


Under Pressure

by TenSpencerRiedPlease



Category: Black Panther (2018), Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Awesome Natasha Romanov, BAMF Natasha Romanov, BAMF T'Challa (Marvel), BAMF Tony Stark, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Canon Divergence - Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Consent Issues, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Humor, M/M, Natasha Romanov Feels, Not Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Not Steve Friendly, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Prompt Fic, Protective Natasha Romanov, STUCKY IS NOT ENDGAME, T'Challa (Marvel) Feels, Tony Feels, Tony Has Issues, Tony Stark Has Issues, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, but its not going to end that way, not between the main pairing to be clear, so we'll see how this goes, technically, the tag is there because the relationship is in here, um I basically spat out half this story in 3 days
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-20
Updated: 2018-04-06
Packaged: 2019-03-21 15:50:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 55,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13744221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TenSpencerRiedPlease/pseuds/TenSpencerRiedPlease
Summary: Tony watches as Bucky tracks his movements with an easy confidence that should probably make him uncomfortable. He knew the man’s skills set and the way he was looking at Tony was like he was some kind of snack- he probably shouldn’t feel so comfortable with an assassin looking at him like a meal to be eaten but here he was.Based off a prompt from DreadPirateWombat.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DreadPirateWombat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreadPirateWombat/gifts).



> Okay so one- I took some liberties with the initial prompt- like a lot of them- but the essence is still there. Two, if you're still here for Stucky that will not be endgame! Three- the Winter Soldier and Bucky are two different personalities. I was going to call WS something else besides James to distinguish him from World War Me but everyone tends to go with Winter, which is my name and I was NOT using that because it'd be weird and it'd feel like I was writing me into the fic so nah. So he ended up James in part because I have a name change planned for Bucky later too (a la the prompt request). Also this totally messes up the entire plot of Civil War, so I wrote my own version of it basically. Because reasons.
> 
> Warnings: emotional abuse features heavily in this. Its not lot of scenes, but there are more than enough to create an emotional response so _please_ be aware of this. I'll warn for every chapter its in too of course, but emotional abuse is a thing here. There are also some consent issues that play heavily throughout this as well, you'll see what I mean when you read. So please be aware of those too. It'll be dealt with, but they feature prominently.
> 
> And finally: Thanks to DreadPirateWombat for letting me use her prompt to make this sucker a thing!

Your scars are a warning to all future monsters,

of the hell you have survived before them,

every demon you vanquished,

and every battle you won.

\- Nikita Gill

Natasha knew she was in over her head as soon as she finally put the dots together. So the guy running the tech was smarter than her- _slightly_ \- but the good news is that she had someone smarter than them. So she called Tony- what else could she do- and from there they set up a plan. Well, _she_ set up a plan he just made sure it was technologically possible for her to do what needed to be done and he comes through too. The info dump goes off without a hitch, releasing HYDRAs information- and _only_ HYDRAs information- to the world at large. She reminds herself to talk to Tony more often about his skills.

*

It’s Natasha that tells him. Tony thought his parents were killed in a car accident and before Nat told him what really happened he knew for sure Steve would tell him what actually went down right away. It was, after all, who Steve Rogers was supposed to be, right? Wrong he guessed so when Natasha tells him he’s pissed and he’s hurt but he’s seen the records too. He had set up that info dump with Nat and stashed the records of the famous Winter Soldier because as far as Tony knew he was a myth. As it turned out the Winter Soldier wasn’t a myth- he killed Tony’s parents and was the famed Sargent Bucky Barnes.

If he was to pinpoint when, exactly, he decided to quit the Avengers Tony knew that this was the main catalyst to the event. It was Steve’s hounding him about secret keeping during the Ultron incident, though, that does it for him. Of all the things he chose to complain about in regards to Tony’s behavior he chooses _that_ and Tony was done. Wanda was just the cherry on top of that shit sundae. Even Natasha, who generally liked Steve, thought that brining someone who manipulated all their minds onto the team because Clint was stupid enough to trust her was irresponsible at best. Tony felt for her really- she was far more sensitive in regards to mind control than he was. It couldn’t be easy for her to be around Wanda still but Natasha was tough. She could handle it, but it was Tony’s personal opinion that she shouldn’t have to.

Natasha was the one to ask about Bucky too. Bruce had just gotten ahold of that infinity stone and they were trying to figure it out when she came to him and asked for a favor. Steve had been going to ask according to her but he had no idea that Tony knew about the Winter Soldier and Tony refused to clue him in. At the time he assumed that Steve would still tell him, and on another level he wanted to see how long it would take. Natasha probably suspected his motives but didn’t say much about it either way, including not saying anything to Steve.

But she’s the one to ask if he would help- read: _fund_ \- the search for Bucky Barnes. For a week he considered it, considered whether or not he cared to catch his parent’s murderer and if so for what purpose? Steve did eventually visit him and he got a whole new history of the story of Captain America and Bucky Barnes. Turns out they weren’t just inseparable, they were lovers. And it turned out Aunt Peggy was bisexual and dating a woman at the time. It had been convenient for them both to pretend to be with each other and Tony didn’t doubt that they loved each other on some level.

But Peggy would never hold a flame to Bucky fucking Barnes- _no one_ did. Steve thought he had been appealing to Tony’s emotional side and he was honestly shocked Steve thought he had one given how often he acted like Tony was heartless. But that isn’t what gets Tony to agree. Its Bucky’s skillset _before_ he had been tortured by HYDRA that made him dangerous, but after? Whether Steve wanted to admit it or not Barnes was a weapon, and a fucking dangerous one at that, so Tony agreed to fund the search because someone like that needed to be away from civilians. It wasn’t until later, and several more HYDRA records being read, that he knew the man needed to be put into some kind of therapy _immediately_.

He was pretty sure no one expected Bucky Barnes to show up in the middle of Sokovia during that battle with Ultron but that’s where they find him, getting people off what had ended up an island floating in the air. They had all made the snap decision to loop him into communications and Tony dropped an ear piece off to him before flying off and giving him several instructions to get as many people off that chunk of earth as possible complete with coordinates. Barnes does well- _very_ well- and his presence frees up Clint, who immediately distracts himself with Wanda so he became useless again. But it freed up Natasha too and she was shockingly efficient.

From there Tony quit and walked away to the shock of the whole team and Tony just didn’t get that. Not one of them- Natasha not included- had any love for him and blamed him solely for Ultron so why they cared that he was leaving the Avengers he had no idea. And Tony had other things to do, like put JARVIS back together. His code was deeply scattered but he had found a few snatches and FRIDAY was adept enough to search for more with him. So he occupied his time with that and watching, of all things, Wakanda reenter world politics. And of all ways to come back they chose the Avengers and a set of laws to make them relevant again.

T’Chaka- the king- certainly had some good ideas but the involvement from Ross is what makes Tony suspicious. But one hundred and seventeen countries were on board with this and Tony had to wonder how the team was going to react. With that much support ‘no’ was no longer an answer. Imagine his surprise when Steve proves him wrong once again.

*

Tony watches as Bucky tracks his movements with an easy confidence that should probably make him uncomfortable. He knew the man’s skills set and the way he was looking at Tony was like he was some kind of snack- he probably shouldn’t feel so comfortable with an assassin looking at him like a meal to be eaten but here he was.

Bucky leans forward in the chair he usually sits in, one leg curled up to his chest in an languid, assured way as he grins lazily at Tony. “We should go do something spontaneous. New York is supposed to be fun and the most exciting thing I’ve done in the last five months is find an excellent tea shop a couple blocks from Steve’s apartment,” he says. His tone matches that same cool, secure way he held his body and it was a far cry from what he used to be. When Bucky first came back he flinched at everything, he was suspicious, and he seemed unable to settle in his new home. Now though he was casually leaning over the edge of the chair Tony had him sit in to work on his arm with a lazy smile on his face that indicated a level of comfort that wasn’t there before.

“And risk your keeper skinning me alive? No thanks,” Tony says, shaking his head.

His response gets him a pout, “its all work no play with you,” he accuses, giving Tony an almost… seductive look from beneath his eyelashes.

If he didn’t know any better he would assume Bucky was flirting but that couldn’t be right. It didn’t help that this was hardly unusual for him but Tony has seen him and Steve together- they were very, _very_ clearly together so this must be that flirtatious personality Tony heard so much about as a kid. Except he was considered a ladies man back in the day and it turned out Bucky never really had an affinity for women. Steve didn’t seem to mind either way, but Bucky was faking it. Seeing him with Steve Tony totally believed it too. He’s never seen Steve so happy and Bucky was… well, attached. Except, interestingly, when he was in here with Tony. Then Steve didn’t seem to matter and Tony knew he shouldn’t let that affect him but he was only human. Bucky is attractive and he liked the attention.

His breakup with Pepper still stung even if he understood her and agreed that she was right to move on. Their relationship just wasn’t working the way it used to and that was no one’s fault really, Tony knew that, but the attention he got from Bucky was… pleasant. It helped that Tony hated Steve. He still had yet to own up to what _really_ happened to Tony’s parents- unaware that Natasha already told him- and he’d be lying if it didn’t bring him some kind of joy to watch Steve’s precious Bucky show an interest in him that was hardly innocent. The slight flush and smile he gives Bucky is for all the wrong reasons but he does it anyways, curious to see what would happen if he indulged Bucky. Until now he’s mostly kept his slight interest to himself but morbid curiosity had to win out eventually and the pouty looks he was getting were enough to egg him on.

“Oh there’s plenty of play, just not with you,” he says, giving Bucky a wry smile. Bucky looks delighted to have gotten a response and leans further out of his chair.

“But I’m so _fun_ ,” he says, giving Tony another pouty face.

He snorts, “Natasha has told me tales,” he says and he’s surprised when he gets an immediate sour look. He raises an eyebrow and Bucky’s sour face disappears back into his easy confidence as he looks Tony over.

“Natasha doesn’t know anything about me. Neither do you, at least at the moment,” he says, his eyes travelling down Tony’s body in an obvious, easy to read way.

Tony curses the way he feels himself react, leaning closer a little because the attention was pleasant and he missed the intimacy he used to get from Pepper. He was only human and Bucky… he didn’t know what was going on there but if he was honest he didn’t care. His inquisitiveness combined with fucking with Steve’s relationship was enough for him. It wasn’t exactly his proudest moment but he felt at least a little vindicated in his feelings. If Steve thought he could toy with Tony’s emotions regarding important people in his life for his own benefit he should expect the same treatment.

*

James- that’s what he chose to call himself- _hated_ Steve Rogers. It wasn’t just because he loved Bucky, and it wasn’t just because he couldn’t _stand_ being a tag-along on his sex life with Bucky, it was because Steve rubbed him the wrong way. Usually when Bucky wasn’t handling things well he took over- its what he’s always done- but when he’s around Steve James learned to hold himself back. It was hard work and it didn’t always go his way but for the most part he managed to avoid the man. For the first little while he avoided existing at all outside of the dark recesses of Bucky’s mind. His ability to hide eventually runs out, probably at least little to the partial shift in Bucky’s mind for the worst.

See, Bucky hadn’t been looking forward to one Tony Stark looking at his arm but Steve insisted his precious boyfriend get looked at anyways. After a week of Bucky managing to stave him off Steve eventually managed to convince Bucky, and James put that in loose terms, him to let Tony take a look at his arm. It was right before Tony was supposed to show up that Bucky had had enough and James was all but ejected into the driver’s seat so-to-speak. What happened was hard to describe, and even more strange to feel, but Bucky’s instability forced James forward and that was when he met Tony Stark.

Looking back on it he couldn’t blame himself for his reaction, he’s only human and _boy_ was Tony attractive. It wasn’t even the custom suit, stylized facial hair, or the quiet confidence in the way he held his body that initially drew his attention. There were two things that caught James’ interest. One, there was a sharp intelligence to Tony’s eyes that suggested he knew more than he was willing to say and James wanted to test that. And two, the first thing Tony does is ask if he was okay. It was obvious at least to James that Tony didn’t want to ask but he had memories Bucky didn’t- he knew he murdered the man’s parents and he knew Tony knew it too, but he still asked. James was curious about a man who could look his parent’s murderer in the eye and ask if he was comfortable despite his own obvious conflict of interest.

So he pays attention to Tony, slowly watching as he got more comfortable in James’ presence- and it was always him thanks to Bucky’s anxiety- and he starts talking more too. First it was small things like music and movies, and then he asked about his arm, and that led to James talking about whatever. Initially Tony responded out of mostly politeness but James watches as he grows more comfortable and starts replying because he wanted to and not because he didn’t want to be rude. This eventually leads to James shamelessly flirting with the guy because why not, he’s hot and Bucky never asked him about _his_ thoughts on his relationship with Steve. And Bucky didn’t even have to tag along on James’ adventures. He figured if Bucky got to have _his_ fun James could have his own and Stark was a good way to go. Smart, funny, attractive- he could definitely do worse.

Tony works on his arm quietly, eyes flicking up to James every once and awhile while he watches Tony work on his limb. He’s long ago learned that he had a _thing_ with technology and James sometimes uses it to his advantage. The first time he ever got a reaction out of Tony was thanks to the arm actually. He had used it to flick his hair out of his face and Tony had tracked the movement with more interest than the average person would have and it had made him curious so he did it again the next time they were together. Tony had tracked that too, but it was the way he licked his lips when James’ arm dropped to his side, Tony’s eyes still on it, that gave him away. He had ginned, eyes lingering on Tony in a way that was difficult to misread but Tony didn’t bite. At least not until today and James is _thrilled_.

“So what is it about technology that draws you?” he asks in a low, husky tone after some silence. Tony’s eyes flick back up to him for a moment and he smiles in a way that was a cross between wistful and flirtatious, like he was half lost in a memory and half still in the room.

“Curiosity. I’ve always wanted to know what people can do, what _I_ can do, with the materials around me. Building something out of nothing but the bits and pieces of scraps that surround you is… its hard to describe but I love inventing,” he says.

James leans back in his seat and smiles, “so you like playing god,” he says.

Tony snorts, “hardly. I like being a creator, not a god. Contrary to popular belief,” he mumbles more to himself than James.

“The difference?” James asks, raising an eyebrow flippantly.

“The difference is that a god acts as some kind of… higher power I guess. Gods have rules and guidelines, I just want my creations to work and flourish the best they can in their environments. Or if they’re like JARVIS or FRIDAY I want them to learn.” His semi-autonomous AIs that James keeps hearing about but has never met.

“You know I’ve heard all about these AIs but I’ve never actually seen any evidence for them,” he says thoughtfully, head tilted to the side.

The point was to get a reaction out of Tony and it works because Tony stops working on some wiring in his arm to look up. “That’s because you’ve never been to my lab. From what I gathered you didn’t want anything to do with me fixing your arm to begin with, hence being here,” he says, gesturing around them. They were currently in the guest room of Bucky’s and Steve’s apartment- or usually Natasha’s room- with a bunch of tools that Tony brought with him for these sessions. The purpose was to make Bucky comfortable but Bucky was never around during these things so James really resented that.

James rolls his eyes, “sweetheart I’d rather be anywhere but here,” he says honestly. He gives Tony an easy smile as he says it; leaning into his space a little and Tony’s eyes flick down to his lips. James bites his bottom lip and Tony’s eyes linger on the movement a little before he looks back up and tilts his head to the side a bit.

“Then maybe next time you can pay a visit to my lab,” he says, lips tipping up just a little and James gives him a full smile, pleased with this development.

*

Bucky is attempting to make food when Steve curls his arms around his waist and sets his head on his shoulder, “how’d it go with Tony?” he asks just like he always does. There’s a slight edge to his voice, like he expects Tony to do something to him or… he had no idea and truth be told he mostly didn’t remember anything of Tony anyways. Bucky attributed it to his anxiety but he kept it to himself. Steve worried too much as it was, he didn’t need more reason to hover over Bucky’s every move.

“Fine,” he says softly, poking at his food.

“That doesn’t sound convincing,” Steve says, “did something happen?” His tone is innocent enough but Bucky senses that he’s still looking for something.

“No Steve, I mostly don’t pay attention so if something _did_ happen I probably wouldn’t even notice,” he says honestly. It was like his mind totally blanked for hours at a time but he didn’t really care that it happened given that his arm always worked ten times better when he ‘woke up’ so to speak. It was nice to not have to attempt fixing it himself because he wasn’t really any good at it.

“You sure?” Steve asks, nuzzling Bucky’s jaw a little.

He laughs and does a poor job of waving Steve off, “yes I’m sure, now leave me be I’m trying to cook,” he says, trying to wave Steve off again when he steals Bucky’s spatula. “I can cook _myself_ ,” he tells Steve but he’s already taken over, shaking his head at Bucky.

“Do you even know how to cook? Pretty sure I remember making all the food,” he says, giving Bucky a half smile.

Okay so he had a point. “In my defense that’s because I was mostly at work so I feel like that’s not a good excuse to take over my cooking,” he says, leaning over Steve as he moved the food around in the frying pan.

“How long did it take you to figure out how to turn on the stove?” he asks, giving Bucky a knowing look.

“A couple minutes,” he says and Steve raises an eyebrow. “Okay, like a half an hour but in my defense this is a really high tech stove.” And it looked nothing like what he was used to in the nineteen forties.

Steve lets out a soft laugh, “this isn’t that high tech, you should see Tony’s house. That’d take you hours to figure out,” he says.

Bucky frowns, considers taking back over his food, and then gives up and makes his way to the living room knowing Steve won’t let him cook anyways. So instead of going after a fruitless cause he finds that list Steve made of all the things he had missed out on, reading through it for something he finds interesting. Most of the later pages were music suggested by Sam, but Bucky happened to catch references to other things that were movies or TV shows. He’s contemplating how Star Wars and Star Trek could be different things when they shared such similar names when Steve walks in and finds him sitting on the living room floor with the little book.

“What are you up to?” he asks, pulling the small book from Bucky’s hands.

“Trying to figure out what the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek is,” he replies and then he smiles. “Wanna find out?” he asks, giving Steve a hopeful look.

Steve seems to consider it for a moment before he shakes his head, “I thought maybe we could do something quiet tonight, just us, no distractions,” he says and Bucky frowns a little but nods.

“Alright. Do you know the difference between those things though because I’m confused,” he says.

Steve shrugs, “everything is confusing in the future.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The problem, for me, when I write a lot of The Thing all at once (I have several chapters of this bad boy ready to go) is that I'm fucking I T C H I N G to upload it all at once. Will I do that? No. Am I still posting this far earlier than I intended because I lack self control? Yes.
> 
> Warnings for continued consent issues and disastrous attempts at plot.

“He is _dangerously_ arrogant,” Rhodey says to Tony over the phone and he sighs.

“Coulda told you that a long time ago, platypus,” he says, “but what is it that’s got you so upset?” he asks.

Rhodey lets out a breath of air into the phone’s receiver, “you remember all that Accords business, yeah?” he asks and Tony nods, remembering belatedly that Rhodey can’t see him.

“Yeah I remember,” he says. He climbs out of the car he was in; slipping yellow tinted sunglasses onto his face and gives the large cathedral a frown. On the best of days he didn’t like churches but today he especially didn’t like them.

“Steve said _no_ Tony. One hundred and seventeen countries signed this thing and he said _no_. You can’t say no to over sixty percent of the damn world when they tell you to do something!” Rhodey all but yells, clearly frustrated.

“I agree,” Tony says and he’s one hundred percent offended that Rhodey makes a surprised noise. “What? I’ve screwed up enough to know that sometimes limits are useful. But I’m guessing this thing has problems, you need lawyers?” he asks and Rhodey sighs.

“There are a few clauses that definitely need fixing in this thing so yeah, if you’d be so kind. I mean I was going to fight the bits I didn’t like anyways but Stark lawyers would make it a whole lot easier and faster,” he says. “I appreciate that. Rogers though, he said _no_ and he isn’t even going to the fucking signing Tony. This is a level of disrespect I can’t even _fathom_.”

And he’d get away with it just like he always did, Tony thinks, but now wasn’t the time to say it. Now was the time to do something he never thought he’d do- defend Steve. “That… in his defense he’s more than likely at Aunt Peggy’s funeral,” he says as he walks into the church. No one needed to see ID to know who he was and that he was on the list of people to be here, but he does get _looks_ for being on the phone. Truth be told he was on the phone because talking to Rhodey was comforting even if it was about politics and a person he hated.

It helped that until Tony said it Rhodey clearly forgot about Peggy’s death. He’d be offended but it’s been a long time since he talked to his aunt and Tony never really talked about her anyways. Not because she wasn’t important to him, but because it hurt to talk about someone who routinely mistook you for your father and accused you of beating your own mother. Tony just couldn’t handle explaining that no, he wasn’t Howard he was his son and Maria was dead. In light of recent events he wondered how much Peggy knew about that too, if SHIELD had been involved in the cover up and if it had did Peggy specifically know? She was the director at the time but Tony knew people kept secrets even from those in charge of them and HYDRA must have already infiltrated by then. It was wishful thinking to hope they covered their own tracks but truthfully he had no idea.

“Shit man I forgot, I am _so_ sorry,” Rhodey says and Tony shrugs.

“Whatever, it doesn’t matter now. I’ll send some lawyers your way, alright?” he says and he knows Rhodey nods and, like him, remembers belatedly that Tony can’t see his nod.

“Yeah, sounds good. Seriously man, thank you. You didn’t need to help,” he says and he can feel the appreciation in Rhodey’s tone. One of many reasons he loved Rhodey.

“Yeah, I did. I may not have to deal with these laws but you do and I don’t want you having to deal with a bunch of bullshit people who’ve never considered what it actually takes to hero around dish out. I’ll talk to you later though; people are giving me the death stare for being on the phone in a church. Last I checked Jesus didn’t say anything about technology so I don’t get it,” he says and Rhodey lets out a snort.

“Dude, only you would be ballsy enough to show up to a funeral of a highly decorated military vet and spy _on the phone_ ,” he says.

“When I was five aunt Peggy dropped me on my head, she earned this,” he says and Rhodey laughs again but lets the call drop. Tony pockets his phone and makes his way to the emptiest corner to hide in it. Everyone who knew him knew he didn’t handle high stakes, high stress, high emotion situations well- case and point that one time he was dying- but most of the funeral goers almost certainly thought he was an arrogant ass with no respect. They weren’t wrong either, but that wasn’t why he was on the phone.

“You sure know how to make an entrance, cousin,” someone says from behind him and he turns to find Sharon there. She doesn’t look phased at all, like this was any other day and any other encounter she might have with Tony but he knew her better than that. He could see the slight strain in her features, and the tightness of her muscles in the way she held herself because, like him, she didn’t handle tragedy well.

“I didn’t even do anything,” he says in his own defense and Sharon lets out a small laugh, shaking her head.

“Pretty sure walking into a funeral on the phone is something, Tony,” she says. She steps forward and hugs him though, “I’m sorry,” she tells him softly.

He shakes his head, “you’re the one who deserves the condolences, Sharon. This can’t be easy for you,” he murmurs.

Sharon pulls away and shakes her head, “it isn’t. I loved my aunt, but you lost her long before I did and that has to sting. So I’m sorry, for all of it.”

Tony shrugs and he can feel himself sniff a little- a tell Sharon informed him he had whenever he felt a lot of any emotion and wanted to hide it. After she pointed it out he was hyper aware of it. “It wasn’t her fault, and I guess I can rest easy knowing she called my dad on his shit. Repeatedly apparently,” he mumbles. Sharon reaches out and grips his forearm for a moment before she lets go, looking as uncomfortable as he felt. He smiles though; letting his normal reactions take over because that was easier. “How’s the speech?” he asks, knowing she was the one who was asked to deliver it.

She gives him an offended look, “I didn’t want to give it. I told them to give it to you because I’m a spy. Showing my face at an extremely well know woman’s funeral ensures I’m out of work for the rest of my damn life,” she says resentfully and Tony winces, not having thought of that.

“When they asked I thought they left you out so I told them to go to you. I didn’t think of your job,” he says honestly.

Sharon smiles just a little and shakes her head, “guess that explains why the lawyers came back to me. Guess I could always do Coulson’s job- leading a team of agents is almost as fun as being one,” she says, giving the crowd a brief once over.

“If you want I can do the speech. I only handed it off to you because I didn’t want overshadow you,” he says. He thought he was asked because he was a face and name everyone recognized and he thought it would be unfair to overlook Sharon just because Tony Stark was a household name, not because Sharon was keeping a low profile and asked to be overlooked. She perks up at his offer though and lets out a sigh, handing over an envelope right away.

“Thank you,” she says, leaning forward to hug him again.

“No problem,” he says softly. “Whatever I can do to help you out.”

*

On the best of days he hated speeches, but when Steve was sitting in the front row looking at him in surprise while he delivered it he hated them with an extra amount of passion. But he talks about aunt Peggy anyways, giving a lovely speech about her history, her accomplishments, and her beliefs. He peppers a couple funny stories throughout, like that time she used an old timey dildo and some threats to get information out of a man in Berlin, and eventually he leaves the podium.

It would have been a lot more satisfying if eyes didn’t follow him through the whole church, still setting on him when he retreats to the very back, far away from prying eyes if they didn’t fucking follow him. When he gives the crowd a once over he finds Steve looking at him too and he looks away, staring resolutely ahead and refusing to give anyone any attention by looking straight forward. This was Peggy’s funeral, not a time to stare him down like he was the relevant person here. This exact reaction was Reason Number Two as to why he didn’t want to give the speech. People would focus on him instead of Peggy.

He ignores it though, suffering through the rest of the funeral without moving his gaze from the front of the room. He briefly runs into Natasha after, who was here on her stop over to sign the Accords, but she quickly takes off to Steve. Tony doesn’t mind that because it gives him time to catch up with Sharon a little and she thanks him again for taking over her speech duties. He makes a note to ensure she got a good job after all this damn hassle. He didn’t have much pull when it came to spy agencies but he knew some people who knew some people, he’d manage and once Sharon was there they definitely wouldn’t want to be rid of her. How she hasn’t risen to Peggy’s level of fame by now he had no idea if he was honest. He’s had her do a few things for him over the years and she was far more prompt than half the people he knew with triple the experience.

When Sharon leaves him though Steve quickly replaces her to Tony’s surprise. He catches a snatch of red going out the door and realizes why, silently cursing Natasha for leaving so soon. “Didn’t know you knew Peggy,” Steve says, drawing his attention back to Steve.

Tony glares at him, “literally anyone who’s picked up a text book knows who Aunt Peggy is,” he snaps. All two pages of information on her compared to the four chapters on Captain America. Who cares that it was Peggy who spurred him on and made sure he got to do what he wanted when he went to rescue Bucky and his unit. Even Howard got more than her and all he did was make things go boom. That wasn’t even hard, Tony knew from experience.

Steve raises an eyebrow, “she’s you _aunt_?” he asks and Tony lets out a harsh sigh, pissed that he left that out. On the podium he’d just referred to her as someone with a working relationship with his father- it was best to leave out how personal their connection was because he damn well knew the media would sooner focus on his relation to Peggy rather than Peggy’s accomplishments. That, he thought, would just be disrespectful to her memory.

“Biologically no, but she was around a lot when I was a kid,” he says evasively. She didn’t come around as much when he was a teen and after she got Alzheimer’s he realized why not that he ever needed that information.

“I wondered how you could have known so many personal details. Or why you were asked to give a speech before I was,” he says and Tony rolls his eyes, unable to help it. “I don’t see why I got that reaction, she was the love of my life,” Steve adds and Tony lets out an actual snort at that.

“Everyone is playing second fiddle to Barnes and Aunt Peggy wasn’t stupid enough to think she was an exception to that. You two used each other as beards because your time wasn’t much accepting of your attractions. Love of your life my _ass_ ,” he mumbles. “And they didn’t ask me first either. Its not like she didn’t have other relatives, they just had prior engagements,” he lies.

“Still don’t see how you got asked before I did,” Steve says.

Maybe because he knew Peggy for a few months and Tony knew her for years. “Look, I didn’t make the plans, okay? Take it up with the lawyers if you’re that offended,” Tony tells him. He pauses for a moment and sighs. “You know what, today isn’t a good day okay, for either of us. I’m sorry you lost her, I know she was important to you on some level,” he says softly. It’s not something he wants to say, but aunt Peggy would beat his ass if she knew he was being an asshole at her funeral. He didn’t much believe in the afterlife, but he did have enough respect for his aunt not to do something he knew she wouldn’t like at her funeral of all places.

“She didn’t join the army in thirty six, it was thirty eight,” Steve tells him, stepping around him and barely missing his shoulder as he walks away. Well okay then, there went any attempt at being polite. A couple nearby people give him a poisonous look, like they were offended that he forgot the year Peggy joined the army or something.

“She was a secretary for two years before she had enough, punched the local Lieutenant probably because he was sexist, and gave out orders that saved an entire platoon from certain death. Army couldn’t really deny how useful she was after that. She was recruited by Erskine not long after- I _know_ my history,” he tells them, walking away. It wasn’t his fault Steve didn’t consider the two years she was technically in the army as a secretary. Not being in the field didn’t somehow negate her army experience, at least to him.

He decides to leave the church after that, tired of his current setting and looking to do something less… depressing. Bucky’s arm could use some more updates- most of the tech needed replacing from age alone- and he had ideas. On his way out he spots Steve giving him another dirty look and Tony considers Bucky again but this time he has different ideas entirely.

*

The next time James has the pleasure to spend time with Tony he’s in his penthouse and it is _stunning_. He looks around in wonder, noting all the things he wasn’t sure about and the list was surprisingly long given he had a lot less to catch up on than Bucky had. Bucky had pretty much no memories of the last seventy years but James remembered everything- every sordid fucking detail of his torture, his murders, and his eventual escape.

When he had been kicking Steve’s ass on that helicarrier it was the first- no technically the second- time Bucky had resurfaced in seventy years. The first was right before HYDRA zapped him out of existence again after the bridge. Sometimes he reappeared elsewhere, but never long enough to matter. The first time Bucky forced a take over was when he stopped trying to kill Steve and when he dragged his stupid spangly ass out of the river.

“See something you like?” Tony asks, leaning against his living room wall, one hand in the pocket of his sweatpants that looked _way_ too good on him.

James gives him an appreciative once over, “don’t think I’ve ever seen a phone that looks like yours before,” he says and Tony smiles wider, shaking his head and pulling himself off the wall.

“You haven’t. Phones like mine aren’t marketable, people wouldn’t know what to do with them,” he says, picking up the slim, nearly transparent device that apparently recognizes being lifted because color immediately floods the screen. Looked like his screen saver was currently Rhodey. Tony makes a motion at the far wall that held the TV and music starts to play- early rock from what James could tell- though he couldn’t identify where the speakers were.

“Impressive,” he says and Tony nods.

“Easier to control my house with tech than relying on myself. I trust my bots more than I would me- they’re programed not to fuck up,” he says and James laughs.

“Something tells me that isn’t always how it goes. Steve said something about a high tech stove but that doesn’t look much different than the one we have,” he says, spying it from across the room.

Tony raises an eyebrow, “stoves are pretty much stoves. There’s only so many ways to make them and to be honest I find household appliances boring. I like luxury items a lot more- gives me more freedom in function,” he says easily, smiling at James over his shoulder.

James grins, “Steve doesn’t even know the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek, what does he know?” he asks, shaking his head. “So what’s on the agenda for the arm today, hmm?” He steps closer to Tony, expecting him to step back like he usually did if Bucky got too close. Or at least who he perceived as Bucky. He doesn’t though, instead he steps closer, eyes on James’ arm as he does and he reaches out to run his fingers down the limb.

“Replacing the metal panels- specifically that fucking tacky star. I thought you’d appreciate it,” he says, giving James a heated look from beneath his eyelashes. Tony smiles just a little, clearly aware of how his behavior was being read and that makes James curious. He reaches out and settles his metal hand on Tony’s hip, drawing him closer as he does so, pleased when Tony goes easily and presses himself to James’ chest.

“I have other ideas,” he tells Tony and he grins.

*

Tony wakes up to frantic knocking on his door and he makes an annoyed noise, “FRIDAY what the fuck is this?” he mumbles. Beside him Bucky stirs, blinking blearily before spying him and smiling.

“Hey gorgeous,” he says softly, pulling Tony into a kiss and he goes, knocking at the door be damned. Bucky laughs softly, dragging Tony into his lap and he goes, straddling Bucky as he pushes him back into the mattress.

“Sir, Natasha is at the door and she says its urgent,” FRIDAY says and he pulls away from Bucky, earning a disappointed noise that just breaks his heart, really, so he leans back in and kisses him again. “Sir,” FRIDAY says again, “Natasha is telling me that she was attacked at the UN signing of the Accords.”

Tony all but leaps out of bed at _that_ because that was serious business. “Shit,” he says softly, trying his best to put on pants before he briefly returns to Bucky. “You should probably go home anyways. Steve is probably wondering where you are,” he tells him, giving him a brief kiss before he all but runs out of the room. He trusts an ex assassin to get out of his penthouse unnoticed. It would be a test of his skills to see if he could do it without Natasha noticing.

When he opens the door Natasha is standing there with a black wig and dark brown contacts in. “The King of Wakanda is trying to kill me,” she says bluntly and Tony raises an eyebrow.

“Wow, okay. He seemed nice on TV…” he mumbles, unsure what to do with that.

“No, not that one. T’Chaka is dead, blown up by some asshole. I mean his son, T’Challa. Also I’m wanted for terrorism,” she adds and Tony’s eyebrows fly up because today just got a lot more interesting than just fucking over Steve’s relationship.

“Come in,” he tells her, stepping aside so she could hide in his penthouse.


	3. Chapter 3

Okay so that video of Natasha blowing up the UN was convincing, but she was also upstairs at the same time so that was suspect at best. “It wasn’t me,” Natasha says like that wasn’t already obvious.

“Yeah, I got that. But the reporters aren’t wrong in saying you could have easily orchestrated something like this- you already impersonated someone else perfectly when you dumped all that HYDRA information two years ago. That doesn’t inspire confidence in innocence,” he points out. This was going to be a total shit storm and he so wasn’t looking forward to it.

Natasha sighs and sits back in her seat. “Well this is bullshit. Think you can prove the video is doctored?” she asks but Tony shakes his head.

“Its not- I’d be able to tell not matter how good it looks. Makes watching movies a real pain in the ass. Regardless as far as I can prove that’s you, or someone who put on a really convincing Natasha Romanov face. Guess we need to find our guy. Or girl. Whomever, its equal opportunity for all. So uh, any enemies?” he asks and Natasha sinks further into her seat, clearly not impressed.

Its entirely possible that she would have answered but there’s another knock at his door. “FRI?” he asks, looking at the door. The AI doesn’t respond. “FRIDAY?” he prompts again and nothing. He frowns and grabs his phone, trying to access the cameras at the door more on a hunch than any real knowledge of who was behind it. He’s unsurprised to find the cameras out of operation.

“Looks like the king is here and all my tech is out. Good luck,” he tells Natasha and he makes his way to the door as Natasha picks up after herself and presumably makes a plan of escape.

Tony opens the door to find one pissed off looking guy behind it. Even if Tony had no warning about Natasha’s situation he’d be able to _see_ T’Challa’s status on him. “Good morning, your highness,” he says in a cheery tone, getting an annoyed glare from the women behind him.

“I will only ask politely once- _where_ is Natasha Romanov?” he asks.

He wouldn’t need context to know this guy meant business thanks to his tone because _damn_ his words held power. “Probably going out my bathroom window as we speak,” he says, not in the business of lying, but knowing Natasha well enough to know she wasn’t in this Tower and hadn’t been for at least thirty seconds. And she probably didn’t go out wearing the same disguise as the one she wore coming in. To say she was savvy was an understatement.

T’Challa pushes him aside, walking into his house with no apparent regard for his privacy and he rolls his eyes but stays where he is thanks to the women that immediately take up residence at his side as the rest follow T’Challa into his house.

“Didn’t expect to come out to a shake down from Wakandan royalty. Hey your highness,” Bucky says, grinning at T’Challa and waving a little. Every woman in orange spins to face him in sync and Bucky raises an eyebrow, lifting his hands in the air. “Relax, I don’t care that you’re here. Its not like you’re raiding my house,” he points out and walks slowly over to Tony, dropping his hands and settling his flesh one against his lower back. The movement gets him several suspicious glares before they all seem to realize nothing unusual just happened and they all flurry back into action minus Tony’s guard.

He’s eying her up when Bucky leans down, “I wouldn’t if I were you. She’d eat you alive,” he whispers. She clearly hears and gives Tony a shrewd look and he sighs, accepting defeat at least at the moment.

T’Challa continues his search and as Tony suspected he finds nothing suspect so he walks back over to Tony, standing _just_ too close for comfort while he glares down at him. “I asked nicely,” he says and Tony rolls his eyes.

“I’m not afraid of you,” he says.

Bucky gives a small snort, “you probably should be. He’s enhanced.”

Tony raises an eyebrow at that, wondering how he knew that and given T’Challa’s reaction it wasn’t something he pulled from his ass. T’Challa turns back to him though; lifting an eyebrow like this was his last chance to cooperate. “One- I actually have no idea where she’d go. Whatever I’d guess wouldn’t be where she went just because I’d guess there and she’s a master of disguise. I’d never be able to find her even with voice and camera recognition. She’s fooled my tech before, and sometime tells me she might be a challenge for yours too. Since you’re clearly on a higher level,” he mumbles more to himself than T’Challa. He’s offended but intrigued with that.

“She’s using your resources, its how we tracked her here,” he says and Tony snorts.

“Then get moving, she used my accounts as a distraction to keep you here while she makes an escape. A spy trick she taught me once,” he says when T’Challa tilts his head to the side, obviously wondering how Tony knew that when he couldn’t figure out where Natasha went. But knowing how a spy does spy things and how a spy actually thinks are two different things. One is practical, the other is psychological and Tony has never been good at the psychological.

The women around T’Challa move a little and he raises a hand, stopping the movement immediately as they fall back into their positions in sync. Tony had to admit that was impressive when none of them were looking at each other. “She was here,” he states more than asks.

“She didn’t do it,” Tony tells him and T’Challa laughs with no humor.

“You expect me to believe that?” he asks.

“Not without solid evidence to the contrary, which I’ll warn you I don’t have. Yet. But I know Natasha and I know enough about how she operates to know that she’d never implicate herself- what idiot would do that? That’s just common-” T’Challa cuts him off.

“And covering for a loved one is also common sense,” he tells him, leaning in just a little. Bucky’s hand presses further into his back, like the action was keeping him from doing something else with his hand. Tony is grateful for that, but he’s less than grateful for T’Challa’s implications.

“I would _never_ do that,” he says with enough conviction that even the women around T’Challa look surprised. “There are lines you don’t cross and lying to people about who killed their parents is one of them, I have experience and if I actually thought she did it, or found evidence she did, you’d be the first to know. I don’t give a fuck how much I like her.”

T’Challa raises an eyebrow and steps back, saying something to the woman to his left in his native language. She gives Tony a once over and nods, mumbling something back to the king. “Okoye seems to think you are telling the truth, consider yourself lucky for that,” he says. “And if you find any evidence I expect to see it,” he tells Tony and with that he walks out, his guards on his heels.

When they leave Tony lets the tension in his body fade out and he sighs, “this is not my week,” he mumbles.

*

Bucky examines the plates on his arm while Steve paces. “You were gone all night, Bucky, and someone _murdered_ the king of Wakanda. I was _worried_ ,” he says, stopping in front of him and looking down at Bucky. He was currently on the couch feeling small and confused because he genuinely had no idea where the time went.

“I guess replacing the panels took awhile,” he says softly.

“You _guess_? Bucky you were gone for almost fifteen hours, there is no _way_ it took that long to replace some metal,” Steve says.

Well it did because that’s how long he was gone for roughly. Bucky wasn’t sure because he didn’t remember coming home either. The first thing he remembered was pouring tea in the kitchen. He doesn’t even like tea. “I think it’s more complicated than that,” he says softly, flinching a little when Steve gives him a _look_. “What? It’s a mess in there, I used to do maintenance myself and the panels are attached to some of the internal components. Replacing them would take awhile,” he says.

Steve finally deflates and he settles on the couch beside Bucky, wrapping an arm around him. “Sorry, I just worry. You disappeared once…” he murmurs, trailing off. Bucky curls into his side, placing his head on Steve’s chest.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he says gently and Steve’s arm tightens around his waist.

“Good,” he says softly in Bucky’s ear. “I don’t know what I’d do if you left again.” Bucky remains curled into Steve’s side as he tries to remember where his time went.

*

Finding a way to discredit legit video wasn’t easy, but trying to do it with the king of Wakanda up your ass was more difficult. His little sister, however, is delightful.

“Its so primitive!” she says, looking around his lab.

“Most of it is old stuff, that’s why,” he mumbles. “Did you run facial recognition though? I sent you more than enough pictures to be able to run accurate tests.”

Shuri stops craning her neck to see past Tony’s head into his lab and nods, “you sent pictures at angles I didn’t even know existed and I ran them all. You’re right- its not a match,” she says and he nods.

“I got that too, once I started searching odd angles. Whoever this was knows how to use prosthetics well.” _Very_ well- they were almost good enough to fool Tony’s extensive efforts to run accurate programs.

“Mine detected that things weren’t right immediately, but I ran several more tests to be sure. Any idea who this could be?” Shuri asks and Tony shakes his head.

“I have no idea and Wakanda hasn’t spoken to the world in three hundred years or better. I doubt the king had enemies, at least not ones that would blow him up in the UN during what is, by all means, Avengers business,” he says. He sighs and leans back in his seat, rubbing his temples.

“Oh my _god_ that robot is embarrassingly _old_ \- is this really the best America has to offer?” Shuri asks, looking over his head. Tony turns to find Dummy there spinning in circles and sighs.

“Leave him alone, he was built in the eighties so he’s an old man. And definitely not the best I have to offer, though what you have to offer is clearly better,” he says, raising an eyebrow at the stuff beyond Shuri’s head. She turns to look around her lab and shrugs.

“Sure it is. In your defense though you don’t have vibranium and that’s the main thing we use here,” she says. “But… the Avengers, maybe they were the target and my father got in the way.”

Wishful thinking and Tony knew it well so he doesn’t dismiss the far fetched idea immediately like he wants to. “There are easier ways to target them, why kill your father?” he asks, indulging her idea just enough to make her think. Once she did she’d see it had no merit.

“Maybe this wasn’t the whole plan,” she says, frowning as she thought about it.

“And how could this factor into a larger plan?” he asks.

Shuri opens her mouth to respond and then shuts it, deflating a little. “I don’t know,” she says softly, tears welling up in her eyes and tony sighs.

“Hey, shh, its okay. We’ve already figured some stuff out so that means we’re on the right track, we just haven’t got a motive yet. We’ll get there,” he assures her. She sniffs and wipes a tear off her face, shaking her head.

“Are you sure?” she asks and he nods.

“Whatever the purpose of this stunt is killing your father can’t have been the whole plan, not when your brother got sent on a wild goose chase after the wrong person while every media outlet reports on it. We’re missing something and we’re both damn smart- we’ll catch up to them, Shuri, I promise you that,” he says softly. It was whether or not they’d catch up in time to actually do anything about their latest villain of the week that concerned him.

Shuri nods and sits up straighter, “you’re right. We can do this, we’ll figure this out and I can tell T’Challa he’s looking for the wrong person. We’ve got at least a little information,” she says more to herself than Tony, obviously trying to reassure herself and Tony lets her. She needed it and he knew the feeling.

“Keep working on it,” he tells her, “between the two of us we’ll find something else and we can follow the trail,” he says. She nods, taking a moment to gather her confidence before she signs off and leaves him to his devices. He looks around his lab and wonders what Wakanda had if Shuri thought his lab was low tech. Maybe T’Challa would be nice enough to let him hang out in his sister’s lab for looking into the murder of his father once this was all over.

He’s considering the possibilities of vibranium when FRIDAY alerts him to someone at the door and he jumps, not expecting the AI’s interruption. He crawls out of his lab and to the door though, opening it and finding, of all people, Bucky behind it. Bucky grins down at him and Tony raises an eyebrow, “I wasn’t expecting you,” he says.

“It’s a pleasant surprise, I hope?” he asks, eyebrows going up.

Tony considers it for a long moment before smiling and moving aside for Bucky to enter, “yeah, yeah it is. How long do you have before your keeper starts leaving me voicemails asking where you are?” he asks.

Bucky snorts, “less than fifteen hours. He wasn’t impressed I was gone so long,” he tells Tony, laughing a little as he walks in.

“So I know- I got a grand total of fifteen calls by the time FRIDAY blocked his number for me. He’s got a bit of a tight leash on you, don’t you think?” Tony asks. He had no idea what his relationship with Steve was like but fifteen calls was a touch excessive given the guy he was worried about was a trained assassin who was more of a danger to those around him than the world was to him.

“Steve isn’t fond of giving up control, especially not to you,” Bucky says over his shoulder. “But I’m not here to talk about him, he’s dead boring and I want a little excitement in my life. Think you can spice up my life a little?” he asks, grinning.

He could continue his line of questioning or, Tony guesses, he might as well see if Bucky found finding out who actually killed the king of Wakanda in any capacity exciting.

*

James sits with Tony under an arm casually, running his fingers lightly up and down Tony’s forearm as he looks over the video he had. So far the only evidence he had for this not being Natasha was a video that didn’t quite match up with her face. “Have you looked into any organizations that are likely to be behind this like HYDRA or AIM? It might be easier to start from suspicious activity from terrorist groups that are likely to target to Avengers,” he says.

Tony frowns, “all their activity is suspicious in some way, how would I know how to separate regular suspicious from suspicious in this context?” he asks. It was a good question for someone who didn’t know what to look for but James knew HYDRA well and AIM wasn’t that different- he’d know it when he saw it.

“Dates, times, locations, strange conversations- they’d all line up with this event. It’s… hard to explain. I can do it if you want,” he tells Tony. “Plus we have to figure out why the king of Wakanda was targeted,” he adds.

“Yeah. Shuri thinks the actual target was the Avengers, which would make sense if it wasn’t _Natasha_ who was framed. I mean Rhodey, Sam, Clint; even Vision would have made more reasonable targets. Natasha has a history we need to consider- there’s a lot to her story that no one knows and there are hundreds of reasons why _she_ could be the only target. As for how the king fits in, I have no idea. I think it was just bad luck on his part,” he says but Bucky shakes his head.

“I don’t know much about Wakanda but I’ve gathered enough knowledge to know that their technology is advanced at least as much as yours and they’re easy to piss off. That makes them useful,” he says more to himself than Tony. It would be brilliant really, use Wakanda to take out the Avengers without ever having to do anything yourself. T’Challa had already been after Natasha and quickly jumped on Tony, quick with subtle threats of destruction and harm.

As far as a blunt weapon to target the Avengers Wakanda made themselves easy to target if for no other reason than their impulsive king. He had good reason, but he wasn’t looking beyond his own pain and James suspected whoever this was knew that would happen. He doubted, however, that their perpetrator knew Tony would have a personal reason to not lie to T’Challa about Natasha killing his father, or that they would end up teaming up rather than tearing each other apart. Or more accurately T’Challa tearing Tony apart.

Tony frowns and pulls away, “you think whoever is behind this is using Wakanda as a weapon?” he asks.

James shrugs, “or an easy distraction, yeah. Wakanda has been isolated in world politics longer than it hasn’t- killing the king _had_ to be intentional. If it were me I’d take full advantage of a nation that wouldn’t take kindly to an attack- look at the way T’Challa reacted. He went after Natasha right away and had no qualms about using you to get to her either. Seems to me like an efficient way to take out the Avengers,” he says.

“I don’t know. Seems a bit convoluted- this person would have to know that T’Challa would react they way he was intended to,” Tony says.

Not necessarily true, James thinks, but he doesn’t tell Tony that outright. “Its not so convoluted- death makes humans selfish and isolation makes them suspicious. You reacted to Steve the exact same way T’Challa reacted to Natasha when he didn’t tell you I killed your parents. Lashing out at what hurts them is just how people work,” he points out.

Tony flinches hard at that, pulling away for a moment before taking a few deep breaths. “You remember?” he asks.

James nods, feeling the blood rush out of his features. Whatever that looked like it has an affect on Tony, who leans forward a little, closer to him. “I remember everything,” he says softly. “I wish I didn’t.” But only Bucky got that luxury.

*

T’Challa and Shuri look at each other, considering the conversation they just heard. “Do you think we’re being used in someone’s game to destroy the Avengers?” she asks eventually and T’Challa frowns, unsure what to think. It would make sense, yes, but it was a gamble.

“I don’t know,” he says eventually. “But if we are that stops now.” He is not a pawn to be played in someone else’s game and he refused to allow himself to become one. Whoever this was they were going to pay, and they would pay on T’Challa’s own terms.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I actually like how this chapter turned out!
> 
> Warning for some emotional manipulation. Also a warning for Natasha's past and That One Scene from AoU in which Nat was basically called a monster for not being able to reproduce. I rewrote it in a way that hopefully does not give the same message- I tried to do something else with it but I'll let the readers decide if I managed to not botch that. Regardless, its there so I thought I'd warn for it.

Steve holds Bucky close and Bucky takes comfort in his close presence, pressing his forehead to Steve’s as they gently move to the beat of whatever music Steve picked. Bucky had looked through Steve’s collection but Steve insisted on picking something special himself so Bucky let him, curious to see what he’d come up with. He chose some classical music that sounded beautiful though Bucky wasn’t entirely fond. He doesn’t tell Steve that though, intent on just appreciating the moment like he was supposed to be doing rather than nitpicking the music of all things.

“We should get married,” Steve says softly, pressing a light kiss to his lips. Bucky allows himself to sink into it for a moment, letting that warm, tingly feeling settle into his stomach before he pulls back.

“Married?” he asks, head tilted to the side a little.

Steve grins, eyes lighting up, “yeah, that’s legal now, can you believe that? I was actually around when that happened,” he says, pride shining through his tone and on his face.

It was hard for Bucky to imagine given how people like him were viewed outside his community in the forties, and sometimes within his community too, but the change in how gay men were perceived was palatable. “Yeah, I know. Saw something about it on the news the other day, and that there was a black president. That’s pretty cool,” he says, deliberately avoiding answering Steve’s question.

“Well, what do you say?” Steve asks. He gazes down at Bucky softly, just a touch taller than him and Bucky ducks his head, unused to having to look up at Steve and also unused to such open, honest affection. It made what he was about to say that much harder for him.

“I… I don’t know. Hey, its not like that Steve, its just that my mind is all muddled still,” he says softly, carefully running his fingers along Steve’s jaw. He leans into the touch, catching Bucky’s hand and pressing a kiss to his palm.

“Is you mind muddled about me?” he asks and Bucky shakes his head right away.

“No, of course not,” he tells him. He opens his mouth to continue but Steve cuts him off.

“Than what’s the problem?” he asks. He looks hurt and Bucky’s gut squeezes in guilt because that wasn’t what he intended and he couldn’t put his feelings to words. It was hard to describe what was going on in his head but he couldn’t shake the gnawing feeling in his gut so he sighs.

“I don’t know,” he says honestly, “but I think I need more time.”

“How much more time?” Steve asks, frowning. “You’ve been free for over two years,” he points out.

“And on the run for most of it,” he adds, clamping his mouth shut after the unintentional words slip out. “Its not you Steve-” he starts but Steve cuts him off.

“If you seriously pull the ‘its not you its me’ line I will not be impressed,” he says.

Bucky’s jaw clenches, trying to figure out how to word his feelings in a way Steve would understand but doesn’t come up with anything useful so instead he blurts out the first thing that sounds just as good. “I keep losing time- like hours at a time with no memory of what happened. Mostly when Tony’s working on my arm, but-” Steve cuts him off again, grabbing his chin and tilting his head up.

“He isn’t doing anything to you, is he?” Steve asks in a fierce, protective tone.

He tries to shake his head but Steve’s grip is a touch too tight for that so he speaks instead. “No, I don’t think so. My arm always works better when I leave so I think its anxiety or something,” he says honestly. It almost always happened when his emotions were running high so the anxiety theory made sense.

“Are you sure?” Steve asks, hand moving from his chin to brushing his fingers along his jaw and into his hair, drawing Bucky in for a kiss. He lingers on the touch for a moment, feeling the way Steve grips his hair, the way his other hand has moved to his waist so pull him closer. The way Steve’s body heat sinks into his skin is pleasant, almost unfamiliar, and comforting.

“Yeah,” he breaths out, “yeah I’m sure.” He pulls back a little and Steve starts to look upset but Bucky leans in, kissing him softly, letting the touch barely linger before he pulls back some, teasing Steve.

Steve doesn’t let him get far as he tightens his grip on Bucky’s hair; tilting his head into the position Steve wants. He kisses Bucky again, hand on his hip drawing him closer almost possessively and Bucky lets out a small moan as Steve nips at his bottom lip. “You are fucking gorgeous,” he tells Bucky, voice deep and husky as he kisses his way down Bucky’s jaw. He tilts his head back to give Steve better access to his throat as his lips brush over the skin there. “Bedroom?” he asks and Bucky huffs out a laugh.

“Whatever surface we land on first,” he compromises.

*

Sometimes it was easy to forget how lonely he was on any given day with all his bots to distract him, or the Avengers, but since retirement he hasn’t had much to do. There was still plenty of work for SI of course, but he was used to balancing that on top of everything else he did and that ease of getting his work done fast left him with a surprising amount of free time. Most of the time he took that free time to try and find JARVIS, managing to pull small scraps of code from all sorts of unlikely places but today he just wasn’t able to concentrate on it.

“Sir?” FRIDAY asks and Tony sighs.

“What’s up, FRI?” he asks.

“You seem… discontented,” the AI tells him. He smiles, pleased for the first time that day because FRIDAY was learning and at a far faster rate than JARVIS had. It had taken him a long, _long_ time and several rewrites of code to get him to express some kind of emotion. Tony didn’t know how true it was but JARVIS faked it very well at least. So did FRIDAY in moments like this.

“I’m…” Tony sighs, unsure how to explain this to an AI. “I miss intimacy,” he says finally, knowing the AI wouldn’t understand. Why would she? She’s a bunch of code, not a human. Not for lack of trying either- he’d gone through a lot of trouble to make FRIDAY as human as possible. AIs don’t crave touch.

“Sending articles on touch starvation to your StarkPad now,” FRIDAY informs him and he frowns, looking up at the ceiling in that ridiculous way everyone else did for probably the first time ever.

“Touch starvation?” Tony asks the AI.

“Humans need touch and when they don’t get enough it can affect their mental health,” FRIDAY informs him. Tony raises an eyebrow, wondering when his AI got more educated on human physiology than he did.

*

Hiding when you were internationally wanted for murder wasn’t an easy task, Natasha knew. Especially not with Wakandan operatives on your ass. The country really knew their shit when it came to training how to hunt people down, Natasha would give them that, but it made her job a fucking pain in the ass. Things did get marginally easier though when Tony convinced the king that she didn’t kill his father. That didn’t make finding out who framed her easier though and she had a stupid amount of information to go through.

Tony had told her Bucky suggested going through HYDRA and Aim records to find any suspicious activity but she’d already done so. It was why she was in this building in Russia wearing an itchy blonde wig with blunt bangs and brown contacts. The slight switch up in features made it difficult to identify her and the sunglasses helped further obscure her features. There were things in her past she had ne desire to share, things no one needed to know about, and for that reason she didn’t tell Tony about her latest lead. She wanted some things to remain private to her.

Carefully Natasha sneaks into the building currently holding her interest, soundlessly dropping to the floor from a window and looking around. There was dust everywhere- not ideal for hiding that she’d been here- but she’ll deal with that later. For now she needed to find what she was looking for. Slowly she walks down the halls, trying not to let the feeling of familiarity sink into her bones as she does so. “Your past is your own, your past is your own,” she says softly to herself as she moves down the hallway to her desired destination. “Your past is your own,” she murmurs again when she passes the training room. “Your-” her words are cut short when she finds the operating room, a table still set up in the center of it like some fucking macabre reminder of what was done to her as a teen. She stares at it for a moment, remembering when she had been pulled from her room for her ‘graduating ceremony’ and she grits her teeth.

They wanted to take away every connection she could have ever developed with another human being and she guessed this was no different. They made her kill her parents. Her best friend. Her partner in the Black Widow program and that was only because Yelena got too comfortable in the skin she had been wearing in America. They made her kill every piece of emotion, every single connection one by one until all that remained was her own biological functions. It wasn’t that she wanted kids- she was no fool, a person like her should never be allowed near children- it was what the procedure represented that made it stick in her mind.

Years of conditioning, pain, suffering, and abject terror built to the final moment when the Red room took away the last remaining connection she could have developed- biological children. She was a monster long before graduation, but cutting off her final possible mode of connection ensured she’d never forget what she was. There was no way for her to connect, not even one she’d never in her right mind consider but that was the point, wasn’t it? They wanted her to be everyone and no one and she couldn’t do that if there was even the most remote possibility that she could find a connection elsewhere. They made her kill all her connections and when she was trough they took what little she had left. No, that wasn’t quite right. They took everything that wasn’t the Red Room and ultimately that was their mistake. If they really wanted cooperation they would have cut her off from that too. Otherwise she wouldn’t have had one final connection to break in a sting of blood, bodies, and bullets. They got less than what they earned.

Blowing out a deep breath she ignores it because monsters were fiction and she knew that now. Whatever the Red Room told her about that operation was bullshit designed to reinforce years of conditioning and torture. She’s met plenty of monsters that came back from the deep- Tony Stark was a good friend of hers, and Bucky shared an uncomfortable amount of history with her- whatever kind of fucked up she was coming out of the Black Widow Program she wasn’t that person anymore. Truth be told she wondered if she was ever that person. So she moves on from the room because dwelling on her past would do no one any good, least of all her.

The media didn’t know she wasn’t behind the king’s death and after all that happened in DC, the ensuing info dump, and the Accords people were suspicious and she didn’t blame them. She wasn’t the type to be trusted when she only ever served what was best for her and she’d change sides on a dime if it suited her right. It used to be Tony’s least favorite thing about her, at least until she sided with him and then he didn’t seem to take it so personally. Typical, but reasonable if you grew up normal. Natasha decidedly didn’t.

When she finally reaches the room she wants she glances around for anything suspicious and finds nothing. Nodding more to herself than anything she steps into the space and walks directly to the filing cabinet, breaking into it easily. Too easily. What she finds inside tells her why. Inside sat two thick files that she snatches out fast, running from the building as fast as she can so she could disappear back into the harsh Russian landscape. Whatever this was she wasn’t taking risks- she needed to get out of here was fast as possible.

It takes time to get far enough away but when she does her eyes widen at what she finds. She covers her hand with her mouth but whether it’s out of surprise, shock, or disgust she has no idea but she needed to tell Tony about this right away.

*

Tony was acting weird but James appreciates the slow approach he was making to him. He’s currently perched on the couch; arms and legs spread wide taking up as much space as possible. Bucky hardly ever took up space but James preferred to tell everyone in the room that he’d take as much space as he wanted. HYDRA never afforded him the opportunity. Tony plucks the cup of water he had in his metal hand out and sets it on the end table to James’ left, gently pushing James back into the couch and examining him for a moment. He stays back against the couch, casually observing as Tony looked him over, wetting his lips a little but he doesn’t move.

James eventually loses his patience and leans forward, snaking his metal arm around Tony’s waist and pulling him into his lap. Tony falls forward with a small ‘oomph’, bracing a hand on James’ shoulder as he rebalances himself. James happily rearranges Tony in his lap, lifting him a little to do so and earning a surprised look from Tony that was undeserved. He’s a super soldier assassin- the ability to lift him dead weight shouldn’t be shocking. “What is it you want, Tony?” James asks in a tone that wasn’t intended to come out sultry but it does.

For a moment Tony considers this, trailing his fingers down James’ jaw and neck. “What are we doing here?” he asks eventually, looking up at James through his lashes. They were too pretty to be real but they were. James wasn’t a moron- he knew what mascara looked like.

“As far as I know we’re sitting on your couch. Or I am, you’re sitting on me,” he says, offering Tony a small smile. It’s clearly not the answer Tony wants but James doesn’t know what he’s looking for.

“No. I mean you have it good with Steve, he clearly loves you so why this?” he asks, gesturing between the two of them. Because he wasn’t Bucky, but Tony didn’t know that and James was content to let him think what he believed. It made things easier for him in the meantime.

“Why not?” he says, head tilted to the side. “I’ve known Steve my whole life,” technically not a lie considering he had all of Bucky’s memories plus his own, “maybe I want something new. Or maybe I want something of my own; I’m tired of living my life through the scope of being close to Steve fucking Rogers. For _once_ I’d like to be my own person making my own damn choices,” he says, shocking himself with the words. He meant it all of course, but what he didn’t say was that he didn’t want to live his life through the scope of Bucky either. He itches, suddenly, to tell Tony the truth but he doesn’t want to risk it. Tony was his, _this_ , whatever it was they had, it was _his_. Telling the truth meant he could lose Tony and he wasn’t anywhere near prepared to give that up.

It doesn’t help that Tony reacts to his words, relaxing slightly and smiling softly as he reaches out and tucks a strand of hair behind James’ ear. “You think I can do that for you?” he murmurs, head tilted to the side.

He catches Tony’s hand as it retreats and brings it to his lips, pressing a light kiss to Tony’s knuckles. “You already have,” he tells him, turning his hand over and placing a soft kiss to the inside of Tony’s wrist. Tony shivers at the contact and James smiles, “so what else do you want?” he murmurs, lips tipping up just a little.

Tony sits back a little in James’ lap, considering the question for a moment while James slowly rubs circles into his palm with his thumb. “I thought I wanted to piss Steve off. Now I think I just want you,” he tells James softly, looking away for a moment out of clear guilt but James catches his jaw with his free hand and carefully tips Tony’s face up to his.

“I know you wanted to piss Steve off, how couldn’t I? It was obvious. I wanted to piss Steve off too,” he admits softly, unaware of that truth until he speaks it. “But now I want you. You’re smart, generous, and so, _so_ courageous. You’re…” he pauses for a moment, the words sticking in this throat for a moment before he forces them into existence. “You’re everything I want.” Tony all but melts in his lap after that, pressing himself into James’ space as he leans in for a kiss. James allows it, pulling him back with him as he settles against the back of the couch with an arm wrapped around Tony’s waist. The hand that had previously held Tony’s hand was now settled on his hip and Tony circles an arm around James’ neck, the other hand setting over his on Tony’s hip.

“No what do you want?” he asks Tony, nipping at his bottom lip, his own lips turning up a bit at the corners.

Tony lets out a breathy laugh, “still you,” he whispers, gripping his metal hand and sliding it lower on his body.

James grins, “that I can do,” he murmurs.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy shit guys, I _finally_ found a damn job after almost two months of looking. I was ready to give up and die of starvation but thankfully I managed to find something! Also I watched the Oscars and thank fucking god Jordan Peel won best original screen play for Get Out because if he didn't win something I was gunna go punch some Hollywood people for snubbing such a great movie. Anyways so that's my weekend lol. But the job may mean updates are a little slower between that and school, so its relevant info to you guys! But hopefully I'll be fine :)

“Sir,” FRIDAY says. Tony groans, shifting a little and blinking a couple times to try and wake himself up. “Sir,” FRIDAY says again and Tony lets out a soft breath, disturbing Bucky enough to wake him up.

“What is it, babe?” he asks, curling his flesh arm around Tony and drawing him back in close.

He smiles as he goes, settling in against Bucky’s chest. “What is it, FRI?” he asks the AI. Bucky trails his fingers up and down Tony’s arm, pressing a kiss to the top of his head.

“Steve Rogers keeps trying to contact you in regards to Bucky, Sir. Would you like me to put him through? He’s been very persistent,” the AI informs him.

Tony and Bucky groan at once, “yeah put him through,” Bucky mumbles, grabbing Tony’s phone off his end table. Tony watches in shock as he hears Steve’s panicked voice on the other end of the phone. “Hey, holly hell calm it,” Bucky tells Steve, prompting Tony to cover his mouth to stifle his laughter. No sense in tipping Steve off to their relationship by alerting his superior hearing to Tony laughing at him. “Seriously, relax before you have an aneurism or something Steve. There was a… technical malfunction- shit happens. Anyways it took some time to fix because you know, technology. Its complicated. Why are you still yelling? When will I be home? When I feel like it, do I have a fucking curfew or something? No? Then why you yelling? I’ll be home when I feel like it,” he tells Steve.

He can hear that Steve is still yelling and Bucky rolls his eyes, pulling the phone away from his ear and leaning forward to kiss Tony. He grins into the kiss, admiring the sheer amount of guts a move like that took, especially when he draws Tony further in, hand sliding down his back and over his left ass cheek as he brings the phone back to his ear. “I’ll be home when I’m home,” he tells Steve, hanging up and tossing Tony’s phone aside in favor of focusing on Tony.

“Oh my _god_ , he’s going to be fucking livid,” Tony tells him but Bucky shrugs.

“Its worth it if I get to spend more time with you,” he murmurs.

*

Normally James switched with Bucky before he had to deal with fucking Steve Rogers- sometimes in the very literal sense- again but this time he doesn’t feel like it. For _once_ he’d like to bask in his own existence and spend a little time remembering Tony. It was hard only ever being out and around when he was with Tony and he wanted more freedom, more time to… he didn’t know, be himself maybe? It sounded stupid when he worded it like that but the point was that he didn’t want to go back into Bucky’s head and linger around watching whatever the fuck he did now. Besides, Steve was bound to be pissed and it seemed kind of crappy to leave him with the fallout of his earlier phone call.

Or that’s what he tells himself anyways.

“Where the hell _were_ you?” Steve asks before he even gets in the door technically.

James rolls his eyes immediately and throws his keys in the dish on the table beside the door. “I was at Tony’s, moron, we established that.” He gives Steve an unimpressed look and finds that he’s getting a pretty nasty glare right back. For a moment a brief flash of confusion crosses Steve’s features, like he’s surprised that James is looking back at him so easily, but it doesn’t stick around.

“ _Excuse_ me?” Steve asks and James rolls his eyes again.

“I. Was. At. Tony’s. Do you need me to repeat it slower for you this time?” he asks, raising an eyebrow. He already wished he’d stayed at Tony’s with the way this was going but… well he couldn’t stay there forever. Bucky was bound to come back and that was a whole mess James wanted nothing to do with.

Steve frowns; looking confused and a little hurt. “What is _with_ you lately?” he asks, shaking his head a little.

“What’s with me is that I’m fucking tired of you calling Tony every five god damn minutes whenever I’m gone for more than whatever allotted amount of time you think is acceptable. Maybe, and this might be shocking to you, I like doing things without you. At least Tony doesn’t try and put a fucking leash on me,” he mumbles, rolling his eyes one final time before he marches out of the living room and down the hall to the bedroom he shared with Steve. Because apparently he couldn’t even get his own damn sleeping area.

*

“I have no idea what I’m looking for,” Shuri admits and Tony sighs.

“Me either kid. Looks like there was an uptake in research on the Winter Soldier and the Black Widow Program but that makes sense. Both programs involved heavy conditioning of some kind so if they’re looking for Bucky back or to find themselves a new fist this is normal,” he says. There was also an uptake of research on Captain America but he had super soldier serum that made him valuable to look up. These three things combined led Tony to believe HYDRA wanted a new super soldier fighting their battles but his conclusions weren’t supported by more than his theories on why HYDRA wanted to know more about those three things specifically. The evidence lined up, but that didn’t mean that’s what the evidence was actually saying.

Shuri shakes her head, looking away from the camera for a moment and deflating visibly. “This is more difficult than I thought it would be,” she says softly.

If she were her brother he’d say welcome to the real world- T’Challa was old enough to know better. But Shuri was a kid, sixteen she had told him, and she reminded him a lot of this kid he was keeping track of in Queens. Bright, talented, and way too optimistic to ever last in a world that did its damndest to crush hopes. He knew that optimism wasn’t going to last- his own didn’t- but he didn’t want to be the one to crush it either. He knew what it was like being on the receiving in of that kind of treatment and he had no desire to be his father, thanks.

“It always is, but we always manage in some way or another. So you’ve got my theories on why HYDRA and AIM are looking into super soldiers and Black Widows, what do you think?” he asks. Shuri looks a little surprised at this but readjusts herself the way kids did when they realized adults were taking them seriously for a moment.

“Your theories make more sense than mine- I don’t have the same working knowledge you do with these organizations. What confused me was why your red headed friend was in Russia in a location that, according to these files, used to be a Black Widow training facility. Thoughts?” she asks, looking up from her notes to Tony.

He raises an eyebrow because he had no idea that Natasha was in Russia let alone at old Black Widow facilities. “No clue, but if there’s something I need to know she’d tell me. Any sights of her since then?” he asks, curious to see what the Dora Milaje caught. Natasha wasn’t the type to be busted so the fact that they had this much news on her at all was impressive to Tony.

Shuri shakes her head, “no. But she left in a hurry and the last news we got of her she seemed to be headed back to America, or at least headed west. Maybe she has news and wanted to deliver it in person?” she asks Tony, eyebrows rising.

Natasha’s motivations were beyond him most days but he nods. “Natasha isn’t easy to read, but I’d say it’s a fairly safe bet to guess she’s coming here. Or at least somewhere she could reach me without raising suspicion anyways. Any other news?” he asks and Shuri shakes her head, looking somewhat disappointed with this. She shouldn’t, Natasha wasn’t easy to keep track of when she didn’t want to be tracked and it was safe to say she didn’t want to be tracked right now so he tells Shuri that. She takes the compliment well, smiling a little and informing him that she’d give her brother the latest news before she signs off. Tony leans back in his chair and sighs, pressing his fingers to his temples and wishing someone else was here with him. Rhodey was still tied up with the Accords mess, and Tony doubted Bucky would be able to manage escape for at least a week given the sheer amount of calls Steve made to him.

He understood he must have been worried with Bucky’s history but seriously, harassing his AI to the point where she woke him up? That was more than a bit much but it wasn’t his problem to deal with. Bucky, he was sure, was capable of telling Steve off himself. So he considers his options for some time before he shakes his head and settles on working on an actual suit for that spider kid. The poor kid was running around in what looked like pajamas with these weird goggle things and he needed an upgrade _stat_ if he was going to continue putting his life in danger catching cars before they drove into busses and whatnot. Plus his web shooters were interesting and full of possibilities. So far Tony had thought up over three hundred different ways to use those webs and he had some ideas still, so he sets to work on them.

*

Bucky was acting more than a little odd so Steve goes back to those files he managed to find on the Winter Soldier in that info dump. Most of it made him sick to look at let alone spend any time on but he needed to figure out why Bucky was acting so… so… _strange_. Normally he was soft and quiet and he was always happy to be around Steve but today he was in a _retched_ mood and Steve was sure it had something to do with his past as the Winter Soldier because this just wasn’t like him at all. His Bucky would never act that way and whatever had gotten into him it made him like tea too, and Bucky hates tea. When he asked about it though Bucky told him to fuck off and mind his own business and that was just _shocking_.

So he goes to the files looking for help, sifting through the ones he already knew had something to do with torture thanks to his unfortunate experience reading them, and sifting through the ones that were related to various Russian Ops programs. None of those were relevant at the moment but he wasn’t sure if there was anything in here that was. Most of it was keeping violent tabs on Bucky’s mind being turned to mush and a bunch of other things that made Steve’s stomach turn in disgust. He does eventually find a personality folder though so he decides to read it.

Most of it was stuff he already knew about Bucky- like what his personality was pre war, his temperament, his- and this one was hard to swallow- his ability to withstand torture before he gave in. The records showed Bucky had a shockingly strong will and Steve wished that weren’t true for Bucky’s sake. No one should have had to suffer what he did in those HYDRA bases. The information starts to get interesting around the early sixties though. HYDRA had noted weird things before with Bucky, like odd outbursts and anger that normally wasn’t there, but they start documenting more thoroughly after an incident in ’63 left five doctors dead and it took twice as long to electrotherapy Bucky back into cooperating again.

That’s, Steve learns, when they introduce the trigger words. With whatever it was messing with Bucky’s conditioning HYDRA wanted to ensure his ability to be controlled was absolute and Steve skips over the details of that, stomach heaving on Bucky’s behalf. But he does continue to pick out the bits of Bucky’s odd behavior that matched what he was seeing now.

Everything Steve noted was on the record for HYDRA too- like his angry outbursts, refusal to follow orders, lashing out, and then a few things Steve could add to that list too. HYDRA never came up with an explanation for it though and Steve was at a loss. When in captivity he could imagine that Bucky wanted out, that he sometimes even broke his conditioning every once an awhile to fight back but he wasn’t being held by HYDRA anymore so how come this was still happening? Was it some kind of stress reaction? A weird way of coping?

Or, and the thought occurs to Steve far too late, these weird outbursts happened to perfectly coincide with visits to Tony’s lab. He felt like a moron for not noticing it before given how obvious it was but it was clear Tony was doing _something_ to Bucky and he was going to figure it out _now_.


	6. Chapter 6

When Natasha makes it back to America Tony doesn’t expect to find out when he feels someone crawling over his body in his sleep. His first thought was that he got fucking sleep paralysis again and his second thought was to punch the intruder out. He goes for option two, eliminating the possibility of option one, only to have the intruder grab his hand and sucker punch him in the dick. He lets out a loud noise of pain and a long string of swear words before Natasha speaks.

“What the _fuck_ , Stark?” she hisses at him.

“FRIDAY, lights,” Tony tells the AI and the lights go up, revealing Natasha in a black wig with one blue eye and one green eye. The green eye had no colored contact in, he guessed. “What do you mean what the fuck? You can’t go crawling into a man’s bed at night and not expect to be punched, Nat. I thought you were some rando breaking into my house! What the hell else would you expect me to do?” he asks.

She sits back on his bed and crosses her legs gracefully; pulling the backpack she had over her shoulders off. “Not punch me would be nice. You need to work on your reflexes too- if I were actually here to kill you you woke up way too late. I could have gotten at least five stabs in before you panicked and threw a punch,” she tells him, shaking her head.

Tony flops back into his pillows because that so wasn’t the problem here and she knew it. “What did you find?” he asks her instead, knowing she wasn’t going to cooperate with him beyond what she wanted to do. And clearly she had information.

“Black Widows,” she says and Tony leaps out of bed, giving his mattress an offended and suspicious look.

“ _Where_?” he asks, looking around for the creepy little spiders.

Natasha rolls her eyes at him, “the spies, not the spiders, get back in bed. Jesus,” she mumbles at him.

Tony gives his bed another cursory scan before deciding Natasha didn’t secretly mean the bug anyways and this was some bizarre test of skill before he sits back down. “In my defense I woke up to someone who had broken into my house crawling into my bed okay. I should not need to tell you that’s wildly inappropriate,” he points out.

“One, your AI let me in. Two, since your AI let me in I stupidly assumed you were awake and that for some reason you were in bed. We all have lazy days. But then you didn’t react and since you’re a light sleeper I thought you were dead. Turns out you were sleeping normally though so uh, sorry I guess,” she says, shrugging. She doesn’t look sorry at all.

He sighs and sits back in his pillows. “Okay Nat, seems how you’ve dramatically assumed I _died_ already today what other sure-to-be-dramatic thing is next on my list of shit I have to deal with in the next twenty four hours?” he asks.

Natasha looks up from her files at him for a moment before taking a breath and handing them over, explaining how she found them in the previous Black Widow training building and detailing her trip back here. “Have you confirmed any of this?” he asks, flicking through the files. He winces as he finds a picture of a young girl that looked shockingly like Natasha and he immediately skips over what was sure to be a tragic story that proceeded that picture.

“Confirmed?” Natasha asks and Tony looks up at her, raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah Nat, confirmed. Have you… not looked into any of this?” he asks, surprised at that. Natasha on any given day was meticulous in her efforts; this was more than a little unusual for her.

“Tony they’re kidnapping _children_ ,” she says with meaning. “Why are you not doing something?” she asks, eyebrows drawing together as something else crosses her face that Tony can’t put a name to.

He sighs and sets the file he was holding aside, “Nat, you told me you walked into what sounds like a highly staged scene, you don’t know these files hold real information. For all we know things aren’t what they look like, or they could be worse and we need to know what we’re dealing with exactly. Whoever put those pictures there wanted you to find them- we need to make sure this is real before we go rushing into things,” he says softly.

Natasha lets out a loud snort, shaking her head as she snatches the files back. “Oh like you have a problem with rushing into things,” she snarls and Tony flinches like he’s been slapped.

“And I like to think I learned my lesson,” he says softly. “If this is real those kids have training we need to account for before we go pulling them out of whatever situation we find them in. This is not something we should dive into head first without considering what we’re doing.” Whatever happened to these kids, if anything at all, they needed to ensure that they were rounded up in a way that ensured safety for them, not bust into wherever these kids were and hope for the best.

Its pretty clear Natasha doesn’t see it that way though. “God, does your arrogance have _no_ limit? I bring you evidence that children- _children_ \- are being kidnapped here and forced into torture and you tell me to _sit on it_?” she hisses, shaking her head. She stands quickly and so does Tony. He reaches out for her almost unconsciously but Natasha skitters away, giving him a disgusted look before she turns on her heel and walks out.

“Wait, Natasha!” he calls after her as his arm drops. “That’s not what I said,” he murmurs more to himself than her. He presses his fingers to his temples for a moment and sighs, “FRI, run facial recognition on all the pictures you got a clear image of and look for missing persons reports, police reports, school pictures, anything you can find to figure out who those kids could be.” If they were anyone at all. This all smelled too convenient for him but it was more than worth looking into. For a moment he pauses, considering something, but then he decides fuck it and tells FRIDAY to send Shuri all relevant information too to see if she could pull anything useful.

*

Bucky had no idea what Steve was talking about with some fight they apparently had and he had supposedly been pretty nasty and then there was tea? He had no idea what Steve was talking about and at this point he didn’t care because Steve had apologized to him for overreacting- Bucky didn’t know what he meant by that- but he appreciated dinner and Steve let him pick the movie too.

He leans into Steve, smiling as he runs his fingers up and down Bucky’s arm. “Sorry about earlier,” he murmurs. It felt right to apologize even if he had no memory of it, being rude to someone for no reason was unnecessary.

Steve presses a kiss to the top of his head, “its fine,” he says softly. “Are you okay?” he asks, fingers pausing briefly in their travels up and down the length of his arm before he goes back to it.

Was he okay? Bucky considers the lost time, his apparent fight with Steve, and his total lack of explanation for either of those things. He probably wasn’t okay but in the grand scheme of things he was far better than he was. So what if he had some lost time when he spent seventy years being tortured by Nazis? Whatever was going on would probably clear itself up anyways and then he could get on with his life like a normal person.

“Yeah,” he tells Steve, “I’m okay.” Steve shifts, causing Bucky to have to readjust his position and he makes a disgruntled noise, catching himself before he fell and sitting up a little.

“Sorry,” Steve says, reaching out and placing a hand on his thigh, squeezing a little. “I’m just… I’m worried about you Bucky. Every time you come back from Tony’s you act odd and you said you were losing time where you were there. Are you sure you’re okay?” he asks.

Bucky frowns but Steve was right, he _did_ say that but… _no_. The thought sounds weird in his own head but Bucky can feel the resounding _finality_ of the word. “I…” Bucky starts and _no_. The word repeats itself and the feelings that came with it were stronger this time. Tony… he meant humor, happiness, _safety_. “I don’t think-” he pauses, considering his words for a moment. Steve watches, concern clear on his face as Bucky thinks. “Tony isn’t doing anything to me, I _know_ he isn’t. Its just anxiety that must make me lose the time or something, and my arm always works better when I leave so I mean if he really wanted to hurt me wouldn’t he take out the best weapon I have while eyeball deep in it?” he reasons. He gets the distinct feeling that this is a stupid response but not because Steve clearly doesn’t buy it.

Steve leans forward a little, holding eye contact with him. “If something’s going on…” he says, trailing off with purpose but Bucky _knew_ nothing was happening for a fact. He didn’t know how he knew that but he did.

“I would tell you Steve. Whatever this is it’ll pass, its probably some weird result of being zapped too many times by HYDRA anyways. Can we get back to the movie?” he asks and Steve sighs, nodding.

“I have a secret fondness for bad heist movies but don’t tell Sam, he’d never let me live it down,” he says and Bucky laughs, leaning back into Steve so he could enjoy the moment.

“I’ll make sure to tell him right away,” he says and Steve makes an offended noise. “What? I’d sell you out for a good bag of chips- have you _tasted_ the flavors they have now? Dill pickle is the best,” he says and frowns, having no memory of actually eating dill pickle chips to know he liked them. Must be one of those weird things he guessed- he probably tried them on one of those nights he couldn’t sleep and forgot about it consciously.

*

Bucky stares up at the Tower and he has to admit it was quite beautiful. He must have seen it a half a dozen times but the memory was lost on him and this time, maybe because of Steve’s suspicions or his own confusion, he was intent on actually knowing what the hell happened when he was here. Nervously he walks up to the door of the Tower, stepping through the door and jumping when a faceless voice directs him to an elevator.

“No joke, today Mr. Barnes?” the voice asks and Bucky looks around, confused on where that voice was coming from.

“No?” he asks more than states.

“Disappointing,” the voice says as Bucky steps into the elevator. He grabs the rail on the inside when the thing basically _rockets_ him straight up. Someone needed to slow that thing _down_. When he presumably gets to the right floor he’s released from the ridiculous elevator and _whoa_ Tony’s place was _nice_. Its all clean lines, glass, and minimalism. This, Bucky thinks, is what modernity looks like and it’s a far cry from his apartment with Steve. It was also set up in a modern way but looking at Tony’s place it was abundantly obvious that Steve has done his best to try and make a modern apartment less modern.

“Jeeze, you’re looking at my living room like you’ve never seen it before. Its not very interesting,” a voice says and Bucky jumps, turning to find Tony standing close by leaning against the wall and grinning. He’s wearing a faded AC/DC shirt and soft looking worn jeans that make him look different somehow from his usual dress. Bucky only ever remembers seeing him in some kind of formal attire and seeing him out of it was… intimate somehow. It indicated a familiarity that Bucky thought was undeserved because he didn’t even remember what happened here but he keeps that to himself.

“More interesting than my apartment,” he says honestly. Steve had a habit of hording old things, which did little to satisfy Bucky’s curiosity about the future. Things were so different now and Bucky wanted to know how things worked. Granted he had a working knowledge thanks to his two years on the run but that knowledge was practical not personal- it was a lacking understanding and he wanted to know why people loved video games so much.

Tony snorts, “just about anything is more interesting than your apartment. Are you okay? Because you’re acting really odd,” he says. He frowns at Bucky a little, like he was trying to determine any outward reason for Bucky’s supposedly strange behavior.

He had no idea that this was weird because, at least to him, this was normal. “Nothing’s wrong, today’s just been weird I guess.”

*

Whatever Bucky said outwardly it was clear something was off. Like _way_ off. Things started weird when he got to Tony’s but it continued getting steadily stranger until Bucky seems to break in some way in the chair he usually disregarded. Tony knew something was off when he paused on his way over to the chair, and more so when Bucky’s breath seems to pick up with the light over his head so Tony could see what he’s doing. He asks if Bucky is fine too, but he must be determined to not admit he had a problem because he consistently tells Tony he’s fine. He refuses to admit that’s not true until he’d wheezing in the chair- Tony recognizes the signs of a panic attack easily enough- and he shoves the lamp out of his way. Interestingly it seems to calm Bucky some.

“Hey, whoa, breathe. That’s shitty advice, I hate when I get told to breath I already know I need to do that and you probably already know you need to- I’m not being very helpful. Um.” He flaps his hands around as Bucky clenches his jaw and closes his eyes, attempting to breathe like a normal human with mostly no success.

“Keep talking,” Bucky grits out and Tony blanks.

“Every single word of the English language and every other language I know has disappeared from my brain. I hate this, it always happens at the most inconvenient of times. Um. Maybe I should go for things I’d never hear. Like ‘hi Tony, I’m your father and I’m very proud’- that’s definitely a bunch of words that would never go together in real life. Or ‘I left my kids with this strange man because his pedo ‘stache made me feel safe about my decision’. Unless its Henry Cavil, then you can spend twenty five million editing it off,” he muses, considering this for a moment as Bucky lets out a strangled laugh.

“ _What_?” he asks and Tony thanks whatever forces might be out there that he had a real subject now.

“Movie that came out recently- guy was working on two films, had to grow a mustache for one of them and when the other needed him with no beard the other guys were like _no_ ,” he says in a bratty, child-like tone. “So DC had to spend twenty five million editing his face to get rid of the hair and it looks fucking awful, as someone who knows about that stuff I was personally offended that my eyes had to look at that. But that is a _power_ move. I dream of being that petty. Actually you know what one time I very briefly dated Justin Hammer and I sued him for six million dollars for wasting my time and won so I guess I’m already that petty,” he says. Rhodey had taken that incident as a personal challenge to up his petty game because he was nowhere near being on Tony’s level.

Bucky lets out another strangled laugh, “you did _what_?” he asks.

Tony shrugs, “it was six weeks of fucking _hell_ so I sued him a million for each week. I didn’t even expect to win, I was just being an ass but I actually won the case and he had to file for bankruptcy. I don’t know how he’s still around even, he’s like a cockroach or something, but that was probably one of my best moments. Rare when I’m talking about my early twenties. And people were really homophobic then too, I can’t believe I won that case but in my defense Hammer was even more annoying in court than in my life so maybe the courts thought I really did deserve compensation for dealing with him.” He ended up donating the money to charity but still, he felt he earned at least double that for even _looking_ at Hammer let alone having to _date_ him for six weeks. He had agreed to the date high on coke and that was when he decided he’d had enough of that and quit the drug. Given his general penchant for addiction that was pretty impressive.

He tunes back into Bucky at that moment, forgetting that he was trying to distract him for a second, and he finds that Bucky is mostly looking normal. Shaken, pale, on still on the verge of panic, but normal nonetheless. “You dated a guy and then sued him for wasting your time?” he asks and Tony nods. Bucky shakes his head and laughs, “that’s probably the funniest thing I have ever heard in my life. Got any more stories like that?” he asks.

Tony sits back in his seat and considers it for a moment, “once my dad decided to get involved in politics- he _really_ shouldn’t have been in politics- so I decided to end his political career before it started by info dumping every piece of evidence I had of him cheating on my mom. Which was a _lot_ and she almost divorced him too,” he says. Why his mom stayed he had no idea, but he largely suspected it was the money, or more accurately what that money could do for him. It was a noble sacrifice, he thinks, but not one he appreciated in the long run. Sure he’d rather be rich than poor- Rhodey has told him _stories_ \- but he didn’t really want to live rich and abused either. He could do with middle class and happy but that wasn’t what he got.

“ _Wow_ , you really didn’t like Howard,” Bucky says, shaking his head. “Though I guess he deserved that anyways. Guess he didn’t end up um… well loved,” Bucky guesses.

He frowns because he’s talked to Bucky about Howard so he knew the answer to that but he lets it go. The guy was still half on the verge of a panic attack; Tony knew that it hardly made a person abundantly aware of every conversation they ever had. “No, he didn’t. At least not by his family. The media loved him, business loved him, so did science, but my mom and I? We put up with him at best.”

Bucky scans his face for a moment before reaching out with his metal hand and resting in on Tony’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he says genuinely. “When I knew him he was an ass, but nothing like what you seem to have gone through. Things change I guess,” he murmurs.

So they did. Tony covers Bucky’s hand with his own, earning a somewhat surprised look for it, and he chooses to look past it. Clearly Bucky wasn’t having a good day and now neither was he so he does what he does best. Offers a distraction. “We should watch a movie, something mindless and stupid,” he offers and Bucky raises an eyebrow.

“Can I pick the movie?” he asks and Tony shrugs.

“Knock yourself out, just avoid anything in the horror genre. Horror and I don’t get along,” he says, shuddering. Bucky agrees and they retreat back to the living room where Bucky spends a weird amount of time going over Tony’s collection of DVDs that he should just get the digital copies of. When he finally comes back with James Bond Tony grins, knowing Bucky at least wasn’t a shitty choice in partner. What kind of freak didn’t love James Bond?

They settle on the couch and Tony keeps his distance a little, giving Bucky room to breathe and relax. What little contact they had seemed… stiff, so Tony figures Bucky reacts to panic attacks the opposite way he did and he knew better than to press his luck. Bucky needed time, and he was fine with giving him that.

*

Why Tony liked James Bond Bucky had no idea. James Bond is an asshole and those movies didn’t even get a lot of spy details right and that was just offensive. But he _did_ let Bucky pick the movie, suggesting that maybe a more mindless activity would be comforting and he wasn’t wrong. Bucky just wish he had chosen better. Tony insisted that James Bond was a cultural legend but Bucky was of the firm belief that Americans needed better culture if they liked _that_.

He opens the door to the apartment and Steve looks up in surprise, “you’re home early,” he says. Bucky looks at the clock across the room and frowns because he’s been gone for almost five hours, how long did these sessions usually take?

“I um… had a panic attack,” he admits, looking down at the ground. He hears more than sees Steve jump to his feet and hurry over, circling his arms around Bucky and drawing him in. His first instinct is to push him away, he’s never been touchy in moments like this, but he pauses for a moment before doing it, unsure if that was the right reaction. Eventually his discomfort wins out and Bucky wiggles out of Steve’s grasp, earning a hurt look for his efforts. “Sorry,” he says immediately, “I just don’t really like contact after panic attacks.” That hadn’t been a fun discovery either but he chooses to ignore that memory as it bubbles back up to the surface. “Can we watch a movie?” he asks in an attempt to distract both Steve and himself. It worked with Tony, who had sat across the couch from him and that must be unusual if the amount of times he glanced over at Bucky was any indication.

It was strange having a close relationship with a person and not remembering any of it.

Steve’s shift in body reminds him that he’s in reality at the moment, not his own mind. “Sure, I’ll go pick something,” he says and Bucky pauses.

“Can I pick?” he asks, hoping to come out with a better choice than last time. He didn’t care what Tony said, James Bond sucked.

“Why don’t you go sit down, relax a little. I can handle it,” Steve tells him softly, leaning in to kiss him before he leaves and Bucky’s shoulders drop. Here’s to hoping Steve did better than he did he guessed.

He follows Steve’s instructions and perches on he couch while Steve looks over his significantly smaller movie collection compared to Tony’s. They’re all older, Bucky notices too, while Tony had a massive array of films minus the notable lack of horror movies. Tony seemed to favor action movies, spy movies, and fantasy. And he had a special affinity for any science fiction related to technology. Bucky had been curious about most of his collection, but he thought a spy movie might be relatable. He didn’t expect to hate it and Tony had been hilariously offended at this, like Bucky personally affronted him somehow by disliking some crap that was apparently a classic.

When Steve returns he looks satisfied with himself and settles on the couch. He reaches out to Bucky, a silent command to come closer and Bucky pauses for a moment before he does, not wanting to hurt Steve’s feelings again. “What’d you pick?” he asks in an attempt to ignore the uncomfortable prickling feeling in his skin at the contact from Steve’s embrace.

“A spy movie, you’ll love it,” he tells Bucky. He resists the urge to sigh and settles in, nearly groaning when the movie title comes on screen. James Bond, except this one wasn’t the same as the last one. Bucky prays this one is somehow better than whatever the hell he just watched.


	7. Chapter 7

On the best of days James hated Bucky but today he was extra pissed. Bucky never, _ever_ made an appearance when Tony worked on his arm but now all of the sudden he was taking an interest? Fuck him- all James wanted was one fucking thing and now Bucky was taking that too. And Tony _liked_ him, he could tell. Logically he knew that when Tony looked at Bucky he saw no differentiation between him and Bucky but it still made him feel… hurt, he guessed. Tony knew almost right away that Bucky was acting odd- because he’s not James- but he still acted like it was James. Normally he prided himself in not really caring about people at all- its served him well over the years- but now his usual emotional iciness has thawed and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Mostly because he had no illusions how he felt about Tony and that was… unnerving to him.

“Are you okay?” Tony asks him, brushing his hair out of his face. James catches his hand and pulls it back to him, pressing his cheek to Tony’s palm and letting the touch sink in for a few moments.

“I’m okay,” he says. Technically its true, he was fine, its just that Bucky was getting stronger and he already had a whole life. James had this one, tiny thing and he didn’t want to give that up.

Tony moves closer, drawing James in a little and pressing a kiss to his lips. “Are you sure? Because you’ve been acting really odd lately and I’m worried,” he says softly.

He kisses Tony softly, “its just been a weird week,” he murmurs. And a right pain in the ass to get out of the house. Steve was on some kind of Ban Tony bandwagon and thank god he wasn’t Bucky at the moment. He would have given in like a limp fucking noodle in two damn seconds but James was having none of it. Steve went on and on about Bucky’s lost memory and his panic attack like Tony caused those things and James ended up promptly telling him to fuck off. He was damn well going to see Tony seems how Bucky _stole_ the last bit of time they had together and Steve was driving him _nuts_. He kept trying to corral Bucky into doing what he wanted when he wanted and… and he had just had enough.

James pulls Tony closer to him, dragging the man into his lap and Tony lets himself be pulled along until he settles himself. “Yeah, it has been a weird week. Natasha stopped by earlier and that… didn’t go well,” he says, shaking his head.

He raises an eyebrow, “how so?” he asks, curious.

Frowning, Tony considers his words before he speaks. “She found these weird cases of missing kids, but the circumstances were suspicious at best so I suggested we look into it and um… she didn’t take it well. I’m looking into stuff now but I don’t know how to handle this and its clear Natasha doesn’t either.”

Hmm. “You’ll figure it out,” he tells Tony, tightening his grip on him a little.

“I know I will, its Natasha I’m worried about,” he says softly. He shouldn’t be worried- he knew Natasha wasn’t easy to kill and she’s a world-class spy. Normal spies were hard to kill off but spies of Natasha’s caliber were hard to find let alone kill. Whatever was going on here he doubted it would result in much damage to Natasha at least physically. Mentally? Probably. He did watch two videos of her barely managing to escape being murdered by the king of Wakanda and boy that guy could _fight_. James wouldn’t want to tangle with him or those women he traveled around with him. They moved like they had more talent than their king and that was no small feat.

Tony leans forward and presses his face into the crook of James’ neck and he carefully runs his hands up and down his back. “You’re a genius, Tony, whatever this is you’ll figure out how to do what needs to be done. You’ve managed to do so with every problem you’ve had so far,” he tells Tony softly.

Tony sighs into James’ neck, “at least two of those times ended in disaster. Most notably Ultron,” he points out.

“I killed several hundred people over the course of seventy years, I’m really not in a place to judge,” James says.

“You were violently tortured and turned into a weapon. What’s my excuse?” Tony mumbles.

James snorts, “better men wouldn’t have given into the torture, lets not act like I’m blameless. And Steve said something about Wanda manipulating your minds but I don’t know when that happened so for all I know that had no influence.” But he had a sneaking suspicion that played a role. He knew what it was like to have someone reach into his mind and scramble his brains- he knew too much about it actually- so if his suspicions were right he had more sympathy for Tony than not.

“That was before. I… saw something. Steve said it was just a figment of Wanda’s imagination but I saw the world dead, Bucky, and the only one left was me. Steve asked why I didn’t do enough so I tried to do something to stop it. Ultron wasn’t even possible; we were just running tests and-” James cuts him off by shushing him, petting his back as he does so.

“So you made a stupid decision based on trauma. You wouldn’t be the first, but you might be the one with the worst luck as far as consequences go,” he says. He couldn’t even imagine having that happen to him, having to live with it too. Not to mention everyone who got hurt or people who either died or knew someone who did. That was an impressive level of bad luck in the worst of ways.

Tony pulls back a little and leans his forehead into James’, “I get feeling guilty for what you did, I do. But everyone has a limit and after the serum you were a lot harder to kill- it’s natural that you broke, anyone would. Take it from someone you personally victimized- after reading what happened to you I couldn’t possibly hold you responsible for what happened with my parents. Feel what you need to, but no one who has all the information could logically blame you for doing what you did.”

“I killed JFK,” he blurts and Tony frowns.

“All those conspiracy theory people were right this whole time about not having the whole story? Well that’s stupid,” he mumbles and James shakes his head.

“I hope you know that if I told literally anyone else that I would not get such a blasé reaction. He seemed pretty well loved; people would probably be pissed if they knew about this. I can’t believe _that_ was your reaction…” Tony is next level weird but James had accepted that some time ago. It was part of the reason why he stuck around, Tony made things interesting. Especially considering how infuriating Steve was on near all occasions- he was mostly tolerable asleep but that was it.

Tony shrugs, “freaking out isn’t going to unkill JFK,” he says like this isn’t one of the most amusing under reactions James has ever seen. He goes with it though because that was all part of the Stark Charm.

*

There were plenty of people Tony expected to find at his door but only a couple of them could bypass his security measures with no problem so he had expected the Wakandan king only to get another surprise. “Is it even _legal_ for you to travel alone?” he asks Shuri, who looks deeply offended at this comment.

“I’m sixteen years old!” she tells him, hands planted on her hips. Her accent isn’t at all recognizable but that makes sense considering people from Wakanda hardly mingled elsewhere.

“You’re basically a fetus but come in, I’m assuming you have a purpose here,” he tells her, stepping aside so she could enter. Her clothing wasn’t at all American, but it did look like she made an effort to chose clothes that wouldn’t stand out too much so that was interesting. It implied she was trying on some level to blend with the locals though, which further implied that she was spending time in the public. “Does your brother know you’re here?” he asks, wondering why Shuri would bother blending in in America if the general public knew she and T’Challa were in town.

Shuri shrugs and makes herself at home by throwing herself on his couch, “he’ll know I’m gone by now and I brought a Dora, I probably won’t get assassinated. This couch is pretty comfortable actually; you guys should give Wakanda some tips on how to stuff couches. Also show me all your technology, we’re clearly ahead in Wakanda but I’m still curious about what the best elsewhere has and my research has shown that is definitely you,” she tells him.

Nice attempt at burying the fact that T’Challa has no idea she was here in several other pieces of information and comments but Tony doesn’t let it pass. “If you brother and an army shows up to kick my ass know that FRIDAY and all the cameras turned back on just before you hit the door and they will all know from video proof _and_ your own personal testimony that I did not somehow kidnap you. My lab is on another floor though, so follow me,” he says, hoping to lure her away from his couch because he didn’t really want the Wakandan princess perching on something that uh… royalty shouldn’t sit on things Tony fucked people on, simple as that. And he so wasn’t explaining that to a literal child, especially not one with a brother who has already threatened to at least maim him once.

Thankfully Shuri jumps up, pleased to go along with Tony’s plans. “I’ve seen videos of your suit and I’m curious about your repulsor technology. You use it to fly _and_ as a non-lethal weapon, that’s interesting,” she tells him, happily following him to his lab.

He so hoped her brother didn’t show up to kill him. Or the seemingly missing Dora Milaje that Tony figured was either lingering somewhere unseen or not here at all because Shuri lied and honestly he didn’t know which was more terrifying. On one hand he had some rando following him and he couldn’t see her, or on the other hand he had the Wakandan princess in his custody and her king _and_ brother didn’t know she was here. He’d disapprove but if he were Shuri he’d do the exact same thing- _has_ done the same thing- so he couldn’t really lecture her for it even if he’d like to. Being the adult of the situation was strange and he didn’t much like it.

“The design was a bitch to get right and the first couple designs weren’t great, but they’re much better now. They’ve got their issues but I’m working on it,” he says as he lets himself and Shuri into his lab.

“Nature of things,” she says, looking around and wrinkling her nose at poor Dummy. “That was the thing you built in the eighties, right? Because if that’s new…” she trails off and winces.

Tony makes an offended noise on behalf of his bot, “he’s an old man, you let him live out his retirement in peace! He’s made sure I didn’t light myself on fire many times, and ensured I didn’t die when I did light myself on fire just as many times. He might be sad looking but he’s a good bot,” Tony says in Dummy’s defense as he waves his hand over his desk, lighting up the room with holographs. Shit, he didn’t remember leaving it this messy the last time he left but to be fair the last time he was down here he was with James so he’d been a little distracted to say the least.

Shuri squints at him, “you light yourself on fire?” she asks.

“Not on purpose,” Tony says in his own defense. He grabs the nearest hologram to him and wrinkles his nose, annoyed with the information he finds so he crumples it and his digital trashcan appears. He throws the design into it and Shuri’s eyebrows climb high.

“Screw lighting yourself on fire, teach me how to make a cool trashcan like that,” she says, impressed.

Tony frowns, “you don’t have stuff like this?” he asks. Wakanda, from the tiny bit that he saw, clearly had technology that was ahead of what he had and Shuri alluded to things Tony didn’t even know were possible.

She shrugs though, “I’m the best Wakanda has and I’m great with hardware but software? Ehh,” she says, waving a hand around.

Huh, well that was interesting. “I’m actually a little bit better at software than hardware. Mostly because I like designing things that look cool, hence my trashcan,” he says, gesturing to the flashing hologram that read ‘score!’ across the middle while flashing various colors.

“You definitely succeeded. Can you teach me? Because I _so_ want to see T’Challa’s face when he sees such a cool trashcan,” she says, grinning at his now disappearing digital garbage can.

*

Bucky feels like his skin is prickling and his jaw clenches. “What is _with_ you, Bucky?” Steve asks, looming over him. He looks up and feels an inexplicable anger that he can’t quite place, something that feels alien in his own mind but he ignores that because he’s plenty annoyed on his own.

“ _Nothing_ ,” he tells Steve for what feels like the millionth time today.

“Well obviously something is wrong, you’ve been getting these violent mood swings lately-” Bucky stands, glaring at him with enough force that he stops talking.

“I am _not_ violent,” he hisses at him, clenching his fists.

Steve gives him a sympathetic look and tries to reach out to him but Bucky steps back, “that’s not what I meant,” Steve says softly.

He takes another step back and he shakes his head, “I don’t care, why would you say that?” he asks. He resists the urge to sit back down and just accept whatever it was Steve had to say now because this was getting to be a little much too much.

Steve takes another step forward, carefully laying a hand on Bucky’s metal arm. “I’m worried about you, Bucky. Every time you come back from Tony’s you act so… odd,” he says, looking down at Bucky a little.

Bucky clenches his teeth again, unsure how to respond to that for a second before a though occurs to him. “Maybe Tony doesn’t make me act different, maybe _you_ do,” he tells Steve, pulling himself from his grasp and turning around to walk away. Steve grabs his arm again before he could do that.

“Bucky that’s ridiculous, we’ve known each other our whole lives, its Tony that’s the new element here, it makes sense,” Steve tells him, tone a little forceful. Logically he knows Steve has a point but it just… it just doesn’t land for some reason. Yes Tony was a new element and yes they’ve known each other their whole lives but they were both different now. Tony wasn’t the only new element, Bucky’s mind supplies, which was where the argument failed.

He shakes Steve off again, “I need some air,” he mumbles, moving to walk away but Steve quickly goes around him and plants himself in front of Bucky.

“And go where, Tony’s? What is _with_ your bizarre attachment to him? Its not like he does anything for you,” Steve snaps.

“Yeah, except fix my arm and make it workable, that’s only an entire limb that functions right because _Tony_ fixed it,” Bucky snaps back before he can think and he frowns, unsure where that came from. He shakes his head and chooses not to worry about that right now, he had bigger problems.

“Your arm was fine before,” Steve says.

“It was functional. Now get out of my way or am I not allowed to leave?” he asks.

Steve’s jaw clenches and he relaxes a little, sighing. “Bucky-” he starts in a soft tone but Bucky was done with this.

“No, I’m going,” he tells Steve and he steps around him.

*

For all Steve’s whining about going to Tony’s Bucky really couldn’t figure out a better place to go. Tony lets him in too, going from confused to worried in about five seconds flat when he sees Bucky. He must look like shit or something. “Are you okay?” he asks walking up quick and laying a hand on his chest. The move is weirdly intimate but Bucky lets it linger for a moment before he steps away. Tony doesn’t step closer- actually he takes a small step back.

“I’m… I don’t know, Steve is driving me nuts,” he says, running his fingers through his hair and wondering how literal that statement was. He sure as hell felt like he was going crazy and he thought he was done with all that after HYDRA. Apparently not.

“What happened?” Tony asks softly, head tilted to the side. Bucky looks him over, curious about the soft expression on Tony’s face and the obvious attention he was paying to him.

He shakes his head and runs his fingers through his hair again. “I don’t even fucking know- he keeps going on and on about mood swings and you and I just need space to _breathe_ a little.” It felt stifling in that apartment, confining. And he was _done_ feeling that way; he thought he was done with that after HYDRA.

Tony frowns, “okay. What else? Obviously this has been building for a while it just seems like these couple things are what finally broke you,” he says.

Yeah Bucky guessed he was right but he was losing energy fast so he sighs and walks over to the couch in the living room. Tony follows but he perches in the chair beside the couch. “I don’t… know how to describe it,” Bucky says eventually. “When I first got back it was fine, or maybe I didn’t notice anything, I’m not sure. I just don’t see why Steve is making such a big deal out of you, this is the only place I’m allowed to go,” he mumbles.

His statement earns him a raised eyebrow, “ _allowed_?” he asks. “Like as in ask permission or was that a euphemism?”

It was probably telling that he had to think about that but eventually he shakes his head. “There is no asking permission, Steve always manages to convince me to do what he wants. Except with you, I guess.” He wasn’t entirely sure why Tony was different, or why he felt the need to come here in particular but it was a hell of a lot less stifling than home so he decides to take it for the time being.

“Convince you how?” Tony asks softly.

He shrugs, “mostly by not giving me much of a choice at all- he kind of has a bad habit of just taking over whatever I do. Or distracting me,” he adds.

Tony seems to consider this for a long time before he clenches his jaw a little and curls his legs underneath himself. He looks… haunted almost, like he was seeing something Bucky couldn’t but he speaks eventually. “I’m going to throw out a couple behaviors, tell me if they sound familiar,” he says. His voice shakes just a little but he shakes his head and looks resolved, obviously working through whatever it is that was going on in his head. “You already mentioned jealousy but did that start before me? Maybe it was subtle, something that seemed normal or innocuous at the time. Or is it a me thing? It wouldn’t surprise me if it was- we don’t get along. Never have,” he mumbles, looking unimpressed for a brief moment before the look falls from his face.

Did the jealousy start with Tony? He thinks back for a moment, considering things. “No, it didn’t start with you, but he won’t let you in particular go,” he says.

“Because you keep coming back. My guess is that you didn’t bother questioning whatever he told you before,” Tony says. He isn’t wrong and that pisses Bucky off. “Ever try and make you feel like that jealousy was your fault? Or anything else that had nothing to do with you?” he asks.

He opens his mouth to say no but that wasn’t entirely true. “He keeps blaming either you or my weird mood swings for whatever problems we’re having. Whenever I suggest something else he reminds me that we’ve known each other since forever, obviously the problem is the new person in my life- you.” Tony rolls his eyes and Bucky gives him that, he long ago gathered that there was no love lost between him and Steve. He’d been shocked when Steve even let Tony in but that was mostly because Bucky said his arm needed regular maintenance and Steve didn’t think he should do that himself. At the time it seemed sweet, like he was looking out for Bucky but he realizes now that Steve never let him do _anything_ by himself.

“You just realized something?” Tony asks, raising an eyebrow.

“I… he only let you in to begin with because he didn’t want me fixing my arm. Seems nice enough until you consider that I haven’t made any actual decisions for myself minus coming here in _months_ ,” he says, lip curling in a combination of anger and disgust.

“And if you tried he’d have a reason you shouldn’t, or he’d distract you with something, or insult you,” Tony says in a way that suggests he’s familiar with this behavior.

Bucky opens his mouth to say Steve never really insulted him but he remembers his comments about Bucky’s supposed inability to work technology and drops it. The comments seemed harmless at the time but Bucky could see what Tony meant now. “What else am I supposed to be looking for here?” he asks in a low, angry voice.

Tony sighs, “you mentioned coming here was the only thing you were ‘allowed’ to do. Any other restrictions on what you can do and with whom? Does he check your phone, social media if you use it, anything like that?”

“I don’t have a phone, he said I didn’t need one,” he says and Tony snorts.

“Yeah, not having a phone today is basically living in a world without connections. Everyone has them and with the way things run its almost impossible to function without them. Guess that explains why he calls me when you disappear too long,” he mumbles and Bucky frowns. He’s called Tony to complain he was gone too long? He shakes his head, deciding to deal with that later, when he had time to worry about it. Right now he had more pressing issues and _then_ he’d get to everything else he was worried about. Which, at the moment, was a quickly piling list.

It occurs to him that he had other worries too. Like, “how do you know all this?” Bucky asks Tony, wanting to know exactly why and how he got all this information.

Tony rubs his temples and lets out a long sigh. “Because I have an intimate knowledge of abuse,” he says. “Howard used to do all the same shit, except he beat my mom too. And me. So I know what to look for.”

Bucky winces, “I’m sorry,” he says softly but Tony shakes his head.

“Don’t be, you killed him,” Tony says. “Could have left my mom though.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If the last bit of this is inaccurate that is because I, the author, and a dummy lol. So uh there's some handwavy engineering in here.
> 
> Other than that there's some reveals!

He considers Bucky from the kitchen, looking at the way he sat hunched over on the couch with his head in his hands. Tony really wanted to kick Steve’s ass for that but realistically he knew which one of them would be on the losing end of that battle. So instead he focuses on making Bucky hot chocolate because apparently he hated tea, which was a weird opinion to have given that he usually loved it. He’s poked fun at Bucky’s love of tea several times but Tony wonders if maybe realizing his relationship was, at best, toxic was messing with his head. For now he leaves it because he had bigger fish to fry. When the kettle stops boiling he pours the water into Bucky’s mug and waits a few minutes before bringing it to Bucky.

“Here,” he says softly, handing him the mug and sitting beside him carefully, leaving some space between them. Bucky takes the mug and holds it between his hands, staring at the liquid for several moments before Tony reaches out and puts his hand on Bucky’s back, rubbing circles on it. At first he’s unsure of his actions because he doesn’t know if this was something Bucky would appreciate at the moment but it becomes increasingly obvious that Bucky was responding well to the contact so Tony moves a little closer, wrapping his arm around him.

Bucky leans into the touch and sighs, sitting like that for a long time, occasionally drinking from his cup. Eventually he sits back, still leaning into Tony’s touch. “So what am I supposed to do now?” he asks, looking down at Tony.

He shrugs, “whatever you want,” he says. That was his choice, no one else’s. Besides that Tony had no idea what Bucky would want anyways.

“Whatever I want,” Bucky murmurs, considering this for a few moments, considering _Tony_ for a few moments. He holds his breath, unsure of where this was going given how weird Bucky has been acting lately but he was hoping for something. It was selfish, _profoundly_ selfish even for him, but he missed Bucky. With all his weird behavior and now this entire Steve mess that was bigger than Tony thought it was he hadn’t managed to spend much meaningful time with him and now wasn’t really a good time, but it was better than nothing.

Bucky must hear his thoughts or something because he reaches out slowly, carefully placing his fingers under his chin and lifting it a little. He brushes his thumb along Tony’s bottom lip and he lets out the breath he was holding, earning a smile from Bucky. “You’re gorgeous,” Bucky tells him in a soft tone, like he was realizing this for the first time.

Tony smiles, eyes drifting down as he laughs a little, “thanks, I guess,” he murmurs. Bucky shakes his head and leans forward, pressing a soft kiss to his lips.

“Someone hasn’t done enough to convince you to take a compliment,” he says and he kisses Tony again.

*

Kissing Tony was stupid, sleeping with him was unforgivable, but actually enjoying it enough to tell FRIDAY to block Steve’s calls probably secured him a place in hell. If Tony wasn’t curled into his side he would probably be freaking out but he didn’t want to jostle Tony. The good news was that he was forced to actually admit he didn’t really think he made a mistake quietly while also knowing this was a stupid plan. Ending one relationship and flying right into another was like textbook stupid but Tony was soft and sweet, and unlike Steve he let Bucky have choice in what he did.

Something tells him that enjoying the fact that someone was nice to him was a bad reason to want to spend more time with them when that was all you had on the heels of a bad relationship. Mostly Tony was only doing what was normal and Bucky knew treating it like it was special wasn’t a good idea. That didn’t mean he was going to do the responsible thing and take time to figure things out though. In his defense this probably wouldn’t end worse than his last relationship so what was the harm?

Tony stirs eventually, blinking into consciousness and Bucky smiles, “hey gorgeous,” he says softly.

Tony yawns and stretches himself out, reminding Bucky of a cat waking up from a nap. “Hey,” he mumbles and he yawns again. “So um, want breakfast?” Tony asks, smiling up at him.

Bucky grins, “can I make it?” he asks half because he’s always wanted to learn how to cook and half because he was curious to see if Tony would let him.

He shrugs, “better than me attempting to cook. Rhodey’s mom tried to teach me once because she was horrified I had no life skills and after I blew up her kitchen trying to make noodles she banned me from cooking for life and told me I was lucky I was rich. Besides, I’m curious about your skills,” he says. Well, Bucky didn’t have any so this would be an adventure.

*

It wasn’t Tony’s fault, that’s what James kept telling himself because it was _true_ but it didn’t hurt any less. So Tony didn’t know Bucky was a whole different person, he still sensed something was different and he still slept with him anyways. And he got the fantastic luck of watching the entire thing unfold, unable to do anything about it because Bucky had a surprisingly strong will when he decided he wasn’t a limp fucking noodle. Steve could walk all over him, treat him however he wanted to but if James tried to not watch his boyfriend’s sex life with technically another person? No, couldn’t give up control there.

Tony was clearly confused and for good reason James guessed. He went from being in a great mood to giving Tony what must have been a pretty vicious glare because he just about dropped his coffee cup and took a step backwards in obvious shock. James had stomped off after that, ignoring feeling like an angry five year old, and made his way to the roof of the building.

This was where Tony founds him hours later with a mug in his hands looking uncertain. “Hey,” he says softly, “I um, made you tea.” He didn’t need to specify who it was for, he hated tea and James knew that. Tony holds out the mug towards him a little, clearly as a peace offering even though he had no idea what he did wrong and James bites his lip, not wanting to take it but not wanting to be upset with Tony either. It was a lot harder to be pissed off at him when he looked so genuinely bewildered and prepared to make up for pissing him off even though he had no idea what he did wrong to begin with. And, and this was key, this entire thing was all James’ fault anyways because he should have fucking said something. How the logical hell could Tony know that he was an entirely different person from Bucky when they had the same damn everything minus their mind? It made no sense but James wants to throw that stupid tea in Tony’s face anyways.

He doesn’t though, he takes the tea but angrily so Tony knows he isn’t forgiven yet. As per usual Tony is given an inch so he takes a mile, letting out a nervous breath and sitting beside him. “I um… think maybe you need some time to figure your shit out,” he says, earning a sharp look of anger from James. Tony winces, “don’t look at me like that, between HYDRA and Steve I think you should have time to yourself to… catch your breath, figure out where you stand as a person and as someone who basically got shot seventy years into the future with no meaningful time to catch up. Plus you basically just exited two abusive relationships, the last thing you need is a new relationship to mess you up more, especially with me. I don’t have a very good track record,” he mumbles more to himself than James.

There were several things James would have expected from that comment, but none of the things he would have predicted would have been feeling like his heart had been ripped out of his chest. He opens his mouth to speak but he feels like something has been lodged in his throat, which was peculiar at least until his vision started to water. He frowns because crying wasn’t just alien to him, it was literally the first time this had ever happened to him. He was built to be a harsh assassin made of death and destruction. There was no room for feelings in that mix and so he never felt them, not beyond the basics or so he thought. So much of his time with Tony felt different but he only now just realized that was because Tony actually made him feel something besides the usual emptiness and vague curiosity of how a person would react to death.

“Tony,” he says, not recognizing the strained, hurt tone that comes out of his mouth. The lump in his throat makes speaking beyond that impossible.

“Bucky, I’m just trying to do what’s best for you,” Tony says softly and James shakes his head sharply.

“I’m not Bucky,” he confesses softly.

Tony snorts, “see this is what I mean, clearly you need time to-”

“I’m being serious Tony. When HYDRA used electroshock therapy, and I use that word loosely, it forced him further and further back into his own mind. I don’t know when I happened; just that when Bucky is gone I’m here. Its why you’ve noticed all these weird differences and mood swings, its what Steve noticed too. Bucky has no idea I exist, don’t ask me how that works its just the way its always been and- yeah. I’m just going to shut up now,” he mumbles. That… was a lot to process and Tony obviously needed time for that.

He’d done a little research to see if there were other people like him out there, people with more than one person in their heads and there were but the general air around those people was that they were faking it for attention. James didn’t want attention though, he just wanted his own life and now it was all going down the drain faster than he had anticipated because of fucking _Bucky_.

Why the hell had Bucky off and gone and ruined the only thing he had? Tony was the one piece of his life that was all his until Bucky decided to swoop in and screw it all up in a matter of a week. All he wanted was something of his own and he couldn’t even have that.

It takes Tony several moments to respond but when he does he takes a deep breath to do it. “Okay, not to be a dick but what the _fuck_?” he asks. “What do you mean you aren’t Bucky, how the hell does electroshock therapy result in a different person, is this some sort of weird bid for attention?” he asks, frowning.

James rolls his eyes pretty hard at that. “Sweetheart, I never needed to be a secondary personality to get your attention so lets get that out of the way now,” he tells Tony in a tone that’s a touch harsh but he thinks he’s earned that much. _Attention_ , as if James would need some kind of taboo mental illness to get people to look at him. Or Bucky for that matter. Bucky was already famous on his own and James, well, he had one of _those_ personalities.

“And two, I don’t think it was the electroshock, at least not just that. But that’s what became the trigger for Bucky to sink into his own mind later. They- HYDRA- wanted to strip him down to nothing but… violence, death. They managed, but I don’t think they expected someone _else_ to… form I guess. I was an accident and at first I didn’t feel anything. The world was something I had a vague curiosity about, something I liked toying with because people reacted in all sorts of weird ways. But you reacted in _really_ weird ways. Its why I took an interest. The brass balls you’d need to look your parent’s murderer in the face and ask if they were _okay_ had me curious. The fact that you’re you made me-” he cuts himself off and shakes his head.

This was already messier than it needed to be, no need to make it worse.

“Made you feel something,” Tony says softly. Yeah, that was one way to put it so James nods. “And Bucky? Where is he in all this? You said he didn’t know about you? How is that even possible?”

He snorts, “when you’re a mindless automaton doing HYDRA’s bidding? Easy. I was suppressed too, with the trigger words, because I wasn’t easy to control like Bucky. Shocking me, or us I guess, only suppressed him so they made the words. Anyways I was made because Bucky couldn’t handle the pain and when he gets uh… worked up I guess I end up taking over. He looses time so he knows something’s not right, but he thought it was anxiety. He wasn’t wrong, that’s why I was always there when you worked in my arm. Your set up is a lot like HYDRAs but that doesn’t scare me like it does him. But I’m always there with Bucky, always watching and I have no choice. Maybe its because I was made afterwards or something, I don’t know. But yesterday was him, not me.”

Realization dawns on Tony’s face and James is happy he doesn’t have to spell it out for him. “Trigger words?” he asks eventually, frowning.

“Yeah. They’d say these words in a certain order- they were combined with these, you know what I’ll spare you the details, point is the end result was that when they were through with the list I wasn’t really there anymore.” He could still function and see and all that, but his free will was… locked away. It was the easiest way to describe it. It was almost like being locked in Bucky’s head but without the ability to force a takeover if he needed to. He’s surprised that didn’t result in another version of him, or of Bucky, or however that worked.

Tony flops back against the small outdoor couch they were sitting on. “This got ten times more fucked up,” he mumbles.

James shrugs, “it was always this complicated, you just didn’t know that.”

“And it didn’t occur to you to say something? No offense but ‘I’m another personality that isn’t the person you think I am’ is kind of a huge deal,” he points out.

“You only wanted me to get back at Steve, I didn’t think it would matter. And I already told you I was curious and that’s it, by the time it was more complicated than that I didn’t know what to do and I just wanted something that wasn’t related to Steve or Bucky. Something of my own and then Bucky had to go and ruin that too,” he mumbles.

“He wouldn’t have had anything to ruin if you said something up front,” Tony points out.

“So what, you could go tell Steve? Then he’d start in on some crusade to get rid of me so he could keep his precious fucking Bucky to himself, who cares that that’s basically murder. It doesn’t matter if that person is seen as a mental illness instead of a human being.” He rolls his eyes, positive that this is the exact reaction Steve would have.

Tony snorts, “I hate Steve with enough passion that a simple reference to a single way he wronged me stopped a grieving king from tearing my house apart. Do you _really_ think I would tell him anything? To be honest I probably would have kept it to myself out of spite- not my proudest moment but…” he shrugs.

“And now?” James asks, raising an eyebrow.

“And now there isn’t much of a choice but for _someone_ to tell Steve something because he’s called like two hundred times in the last twenty four hours. I honestly wish that was an exaggeration but I’m pretty sure I might be underestimating the calls actually. Pretty sure at this point sheer hatred for me is keeping him away at the moment,” Tony says but James knew that wasn’t true. Steve was a loose canon with control issues- James figured it took one to know one- so he was sure Steve was staying away for some other reason.

He sighs, “still want to break up?” he asks and Tony gives him a _look_.

“I don’t even know who the fuck I’m dating so yeah, until further notice I think its safe to say this relationship is pooched.”

*

Tony frowns at Shuri’s idea of ‘bad at software’ because it was like ten times more advanced than his. “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asks.

“Because that’s way better than anything I’ve designed, I thought you said you were bad at this,” he says. He’s seen videos of what she could do in her lab as well and honestly Tony was extremely impressed with her work. There was this other kid he was keeping an eye on, Riri, and she would probably get along well with the princess. They were around the same age so Tony figured they might get along if he introduced them. Either way their brilliance was clearly the way of the future and he was out _classed_. It didn’t happen often if ever and honestly he was impressed.

“I’m not, all my things are directly built to function with hardware- they work directly together. Your designs are free standing; they have their own functions. I mean technically they’re not outside of hardware obviously, but their commands aren’t directly linked to their hardware like mine are. You know like my software links into controlling planes at a distance, your software is cool lab trash cans and the ability to make 3D designs in mid air without ever attaching it to something beyond where the actual operating system is installed,” she says, waving a hand around.

She was clearly having trouble articulating her thoughts but Tony got what she meant. “So you have a hard time making software that doesn’t directly link to how you want your hardware to function, you mean?” he asks and Shuri rolls her eyes.

“Of course you’d word that better but yes, basically. So how do you do it?” she asks.

He smiles, “the good news is that you’re already much better than I am at this, and the even better news is that I’m pretty sure your confusion is because someone didn’t give you a good explanation of how to make software do the thing. Follow me,” he says, walking over to his desk, or more accurately the heart of his lab.

From there he shows Shuri how to the code worked, learned a few things about Wakandan coding systems, and then had the absolute delight of watching Shuri immediately design a trash can that was way cooler than his original in both code and actual design. She looks enthused to have learned something and Tony was pleased to have managed to be of use to her given how obviously ahead of him she was.

It was an odd position to be in given that before he met her he was the best there was, but someone had to surpass him eventually, he’d actually be disappointed it that never happened, and Shuri was it. Riri would probably get there too, but he figured she had a couple years to go before she was better than him. For now they were nearly on par, slightly in favor of him. But she was making things as a teen that he needed forty years to make- she’d be better than him in time.

“So,” Shuri says after a long while of experimenting with coding. “We bugged your living room and would greatly appreciate not being privy to your sex life.”

Tony’s jaw drops and he’s a cross between embarrassed people heard all that and horrified that the king _bugged his house_. “Well… maybe you guys should have minded your own business!” he counters.

Shuri nods, “that’s what I told T’Challa be he was all ‘we needed information’,” she says in a poor imitation of her brother. “I turned them off long ago, don’t tell him, but there are things I know about you that I never needed to.” She looks as horrified as Tony felt.

“Please remove them _immediately_ ,” he tells her, surprised by how much his voice resembled a parent’s. It was yet another unfamiliar feeling.

She nods, “gladly.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wasn't gunna update so soon, but then I was like fuck it lol.

James watches Tony, and he watches Tony watch him too. Clearly he’s emotionally hung up on him and James wants to take advantage of it but he doesn’t. His bad ideas have done enough for him already, but that doesn’t mean he was giving up. He continues to watch Tony watch him, something he might find worrying considering he was attempting to replace some more of that old wiring in his arm but Tony was good at multitasking.

He must lose his concentration though because he sighs and leans back, “please stop looking at me like that,” he says finally.

He takes his time looking over Tony’s body, noting his soft looking sweat pants with ‘War Machine’ written down the side and the faded band T-shirt that speaks to a level of intimacy that clearly hadn’t left when the knowledge that he wasn’t Bucky did. Tony wore suits like shields- including the metal one that was a literal shield- his being dressed down was his own weird kind of vulnerability. So he smiles slow and deliberate, “look at you like what?” he asks, slight Russian accent leaking through. Usually he hid it under Bucky’s ridiculous Brooklyn accent but Tony knew so what was the point? The accent clearly registers with Tony but thankfully he ignores that in favor of giving him a _look_.

“You know what I mean, you’re still doing it,” Tony says, waving at him.

Yeah, he was and he knew it. “I’m just looking at you the way I always have,” he points out.

Tony opens his mouth and then closes it, “that’s not the point,” he says softly.

“Maybe not,” he murmurs, “but this shouldn’t be a problem. So technically I’m not who you thought I was, that doesn’t really change our relationship.” Just everything else around it plus the complication of Bucky. That still stung, Tony’s sleeping with Bucky, but ultimately he had no idea and he couldn’t expect him to no matter how much he’d like to hold him responsible for that. But he couldn’t make decisions with information he didn’t have.

“It changes _everything_ ,” Tony says.

“Like what? Bucky doesn’t even have any memory of our relationship anyways,” he says, rolling his eyes.

Tony, however, looks kind of like he’s swallowed a bee. “Is that seriously supposed to make me feel better?” he asks, voice rising a little at the end.

“What’s it matter if he remembers or not, he off and slept with you too, its not like he’s _suffering_ ,” he mumbles more to himself than Tony. And Bucky was the one who deserved to suffer anyways, he was always the one escaping and forcing _him_ to deal with Bucky’s shit show. Then he went and fucked the only thing he had to his damn self unbeknownst to Tony. Or technically Bucky too but he personally felt figuring out you had an entire other person in your head shouldn’t be hard to figure out. Tony noticed right away. Hell, _Steve_ noticed right away.

“He’s an entire person I didn’t know wasn’t you! And wait, what am I supposed to call you anyways? Seems weird to call you Bucky,” he says, wrinkling his nose in a way Steve never would. Steve would be in denial and if he wasn’t he’d do his best to get rid of the bits of Bucky he didn’t love like he already did now. But Tony makes a good point and when he opens his mouth to say James it sticks in his throat for a moment. James was a name he gave himself because it was different than Bucky’s, but technically it was still a form of attaching himself to Bucky. For the first time he actually gets a chance to be whomever he wanted with whatever name he wanted totally free of Bucky and he was going to use Bucky’s first name? No.

Instead he smiles again but its different from his last smile, more like it was for himself than Tony. “Yasha,” he says finally, “my name is Yasha.” The long form of the name, Yakov, was technically the Russian form of Jacob or James, but it seemed more fitting that he chose a name that was, for all intents and purposes, from his home country. And its something Bucky would never chose even if it did technically link back to his first name.

Tony considers this for a long moment. “Yasha,” he says faintly, gaze falling softly over his features. “Suits you,” he adds.

“So do you. We understand each other, Tony, probably better than most people would. Its not like people are accepting of self-serving motivations let alone how we started. But I get you and your anger at Steve, I get why you’d want to piss him off. Of course you did and I was the only weapon you had against him that you knew would work. Thankfully for you we had the same goal.” One he understood at that, and he wasn’t offended by it either. People were cruel and they didn’t make good choices, Tony was hardly an exception and he accepted that. It wasn’t like his own motivations were pure and unlike a certain someone they knew he wasn’t going to hold Tony to hypocritical standards either.

“This entire thing was selfish of me,” Tony mumbles more to himself than Yasha.

He shrugs, “so what if it was, I used you too and you don’t seem offended about it. And in your defense Bucky was an accident so you can’t hold yourself responsible for _that_. And its not like I made your goal difficult to achieve,” he points out, grinning.

Color touches Tony’s cheeks as he laughs a little and looks away, “guess not. Things are still complicated though,” he says softly.

“Or maybe you’re making it that way. Bucky got his relationship however thankfully short lived that was, I don’t see why I can’t have mine,” he says.

*

How the fuck he always managed to get into these ridiculous situations he had no fucking clue but Tony seemed to be a magnet for all things ridiculous. He sighs as… the fuck if he knew walks out of his bedroom and rubs his eyes. “What time is it?” Bucky- Tony knew it was Bucky because apparently Yasha fucking faked a Brooklyn accent- asks.

“There’s a clock in your room, but its almost noon,” he tells Bucky.

Bucky squints, clearly trying to remember if he saw a clock but he was probably looking at the walls, not the night stand. Tony knew Steve didn’t keep digital clocks so it probably hadn’t occurred to him to look where most kept their clocks these days so he tells him where to look. While he takes off Tony lays his head on the island of the kitchen wondering what the fuck he was going to do. Emotions weren’t his strong suit but getting mixed up with two people in one body when one of them seemed completely unaware of the other plus a creepy possessive boyfriend Tony was _shocked_ hadn’t shown up to beat his ass yet? That was just out of his scope of things he could deal with and currently his only friend was a sixteen year old kid from halfway across the world. God his life was embarrassing. If Rhodey wasn’t eyeball deep in Accords negotiations while Steve apparently fought him the whole way he’d call him, but for now he left Rhodey alone. He already had enough to deal with and Tony could fill him in later.

When Bucky returns though he looks like he’s achieved something so Tony guesses he found the clock. Or at least he looks like that until his eyes land on Tony again, than he looks down, clearly unsure what to do. “Um,” he mumbles more to himself than Tony, “I uh, well I really like you but I’m pretty sure a relationship at the moment would be a bad idea.” He winces like he expects Tony to react badly but all Tony does is nod. Bucky relaxes and Tony has to wonder what the fuck Steve _did_ to him if having an opinion that was true made him tense up like that.

“Yeah, and uh… I have something to show you,” he tells Bucky. He grabs the StarkPad beside him and walks over, drawing a confused look from Bucky but he doesn’t look afraid at least. He takes that as a victory in light of recent events. “You aren’t the only one living in your head,” he says and he hands over the tablet, pressing play on the helpful video he made. Some of it was probably a bunch of stuff he didn’t want to see, but was relevant to him nonetheless. Tony would want to know if he had another person in his head sleeping with people. Besides that Yasha made several references that outright stated he was aware of Bucky’s life, memories, and most importantly his relationships. Meaning he knew all about Steve. It only seemed fair that Bucky know about him. Even if they technically slept together too.

That had obviously been an accident but Yasha was lying to himself if he was trying to act like he wasn’t biter about it. He put on a better act that Tony would have if he technically got cheated on- and wasn’t _that_ fucked up- but he clearly still had feelings about it. And Bucky, the poor bastard went from looking confused to shocked to horrified and eventually settles on dumbfounded. Tony watches as he basically goes through the five stages of grief in a matter of seconds before he stops the video himself, proving Steve’s bad with technology theory wrong.

“Sorry,” Tony mumbles, looking away. He jumps a little when he feels a hand on his shoulder and looks up to find Bucky frowning at him.

“For what?” he asks.

Tony sighs, “thinking a totally different person was you, sleeping with said person under the guise that he was you, actually sleeping with you, bursting your bubble to the fact that you apparently have way bigger problems than anyone could have guessed, and probably some stuff I haven’t thought of yet. That’s kind of a big deal,” he says, nodding at the now paused of video.

Bucky still looks confused before he finally shakes his head. “One, none of that stuff was your fault- its pretty obvious you didn’t realize… Yeah, I’ll deal with that later. But at least you actually figured out what the problem was and explained it. Steve thought it was _you_ ,” he mumbles. Tony can’t help it, he rolls his eyes at that and then gathers himself because that was unfair to Bucky.

“You deserved to know what was happening,” he says simply. There was no other way to put it and if Tony was in that position he would want someone to tell him he was sharing a body with someone else too.

Bucky looks back down at the video and his shoulders droop a little. “Did… we seriously slept together before… before?” he asks.

He nods, “several times. That video was pretty conservative,” he says and Bucky looks slightly horrified. “Sorry,” he adds again.

“There was like five different- _seriously_?” he asks.

“I’m a pretty randy guy?” he asks more than states and Bucky snorts.

“That’s an under exaggeration,” he mumbles. “Okay, um. What the _fuck_?” he asks, staring back down at the video.

“I’m going to be honest I have no idea how to handle this. I don’t know what you need, if you need anything, or if you even _want_ anything from me after all of… this,” he says, gesturing to the video.

“I… don’t have anywhere else to go,” Bucky says softly, almost too softly to hear and that just broke Tony’s heart.

“You don’t need to go anywhere,” he says quickly, “but if you want I can set you up somewhere that isn’t here with me to give you space. You probably need a little time to think before you can figure out how to like… live in the modern world.” Seems how Steve hadn’t allowed him to do much of anything that he didn’t want.

Bucky looks down at him, head titled to the side. “Why would you do any of that stuff?” he asks softly.

Tony shrugs, “one, you need it. And I’m half the reason you don’t have anywhere else to go so it’s only fair that I do my part,” he adds, looking away.

He’s surprised when Bucky tilts his head back up, “Tony, you didn’t _do_ anything. And its not your fault I have no where else to go, that’s Steve’s. You were the one who gave me a way to get out of that, and you’re still the only one giving me an option out of the option I had to get out of _that_. So stop apologizing like you’ve done something wrong. Also I don’t really want to go anywhere else at the moment. This is enough of a shock as it is- you talk to the _walls_ ,” he says, giving the nearest speaker in the room a suspicious look.

Everyone did that with FRIDAY and JARVIS before her and he laughs, “FRIDAY isn’t something everyone has. Your own apartment would probably be less of a shock, but if you want to stay here you can. The uh… well the problem is Steve and your stuff. FRIDAY has informed me that his calls are growing more frequent and I’m honestly surprised he hasn’t just showed up here,” he says honestly.

For a moment Bucky looks panicked but he takes a breath before speaking. “Can he do that? Just show up?”

Tony shrugs, “technically yeah, but he wouldn’t be able to get in. This place was built to survive tougher stuff than super soldiers with a vengeance,” he says. It was built to withstand alien invasions, hulks, and gods among other things Tony didn’t know existed until the last decade.

This seems to relax Bucky a bit and Tony is happy for it. “That’s probably why he hasn’t shown up then. And that this place is public. He always acts different if other people are around but I can’t figure out what it is…” he murmurs more to himself than Tony.

Unfortunately Tony knows the answer to that. “Whatever he says doesn’t have that condescending undertone. Whatever comes out is actually loving, not a subtle way of insulting you. Kind of like the difference between an insult from a friend and an insult from someone you don’t know- they could say the same thing but the intent changes the words completely,” he says and Bucky’s eyes go wide.

“Yeah, that’s it!” he says excitedly before wincing. “Sorry you have that frame of reference,” he mumbles.

“What’s done is done. The person who actually needs an apology is you but I doubt any apology Steve would offer would be genuine. And he _will_ apologize, probably claim to change, definitely claim to love you, and most likely blame me for all of this. Cycle of abuse is a bitch,” he says bluntly.

When Bucky frowns Tony knows he’s probably been through a few cycles if that sounded familiar to him. Probably nothing too extreme- most of Steve’s behavior sounded controlling more than anything, but it would escalate. It always did, especially when the person on the receiving end of the abuse started to question things. Hence Tony being blamed for things he wasn’t responsible for when Bucky refused to be isolated from him. Abuse 101 was isolation and when your victim didn’t have any connections to the world it wasn’t hard to shut them away. But when Bucky, or Yasha, who fucking knew there, refused to listen the logical way to cut him off was to claim he was a problem. In the end that backfired.

“Can… can you explain more about abusive relationships?” Bucky asks softly. He looks so hurt and lost that Tony can’t help but reach out to him but he drops his hand before he makes contact, not wanting to push Bucky in this condition. “I’m not a leper, Tony, you can touch me. I’ll tell you if I don’t want you to,” he says.

Tony raises an eyebrow, “would you? Don’t answer that right away- I’m serious. Would you tell me even if you ran the risk of making me angry?”

The question clearly makes Bucky think, but after several moments of silence he nods. “Yeah, I would. You listen,” he explains. “And I miss touch,” he adds softly. “After seventy years where the only touch I got was torture I…” he trails off, not knowing how to explain his feelings. “I think the other me, the other personality, whatever he is I think he feels the same way.”

Yeah, so did he except he’s never really been lacking touch. What he had been lacking was positive touch and it wasn’t something he realized until he read that information on touch starvation FRIDAY sent him a while back. “Its called being touch starved,” Tony tells him, “and touch is important to mental health. Well, positive touch. I can do that for you if you need, god knows I don’t have enough of it, and I know you aren’t looking for anything out of it. I won’t cross whatever boundaries you set up,” he says. “And I should probably find you a therapist,” he adds.

*

When Yasha reappears Tony knows it right away. It was basically impossible not to once he knew how Bucky acted and how Yasha did. The difference was like night and day, especially since Yasha was currently _pissed_. “How come Bucky gets a relationship with you but _I_ don’t, I was the one who _started_ a relationship with you!” he all but yells.

Tony sighs, “because if I give Bucky an inch he won’t try and take a mile, Yasha. You would- you’re about to,” he points out.

This only seems to piss him off more but he clenches his jaw, unwilling to vocalize what Tony had picked up on. Instead he stands there silent for several moments before the anger seems to leave his frame, “I just want to keep the one thing I have,” he says softly, looking at the ground. When he turns away, his face twisting in anger a little as he blinks rapidly Tony knows it isn’t a manipulation tactic so he sighs.

“I shouldn’t be the only thing you have,” he says softly. “Go out and explore, find hobbies, friends, a job, whatever. I get that you want to keep what’s familiar but you need to sort yourself out, so does Bucky. Adding a relationship to that mess won’t do anything to help you,” he tells him.

“Maybe not, but its not like I had much opportunity to get a hobby- I spent most of my time hiding from Steve,” Yasha mumbles and Tony frowns because it isn’t the first time he’s alluded to more control.

“What do you mean by that? How much control _do_ you have?” he asks. He isn’t sure if he’s asking for his own benefit or for Bucky’s.

Yasha shrugs, “a lot more than Bucky. He can’t really force a takeover- he’s only managed once and that’s when I was about to kill Steve. He didn’t really know much about me at all until you went and filled him in. Thanks for that, by the way. I _liked_ not being known about,” he says, giving Tony a _look_.

Yeah, he didn’t really care what Yasha thought of that, _someone_ had to fill Bucky in on what was happening when he was losing time. If Tony were in his situation he would want to know too. “Bucky deserved to know what was going on so suck it up- I wasn’t keeping information like that to myself. Not when it’s literally life altering, for both of us- actually all three of us.” Tony tells him. He’s learned his lesson, probably one too many times, about keeping things he shouldn’t to himself.

For a moment Yasha just continues to look annoyed but then he sighs. “Fine, okay, I guess that kind of makes my life easier anyways. Just…” he trails off for a second, sighing before speaking again. “Can I suggest something?” he asks finally.

Tony is tempted to say no but he figures that would probably come later anyways so he sighs. “Go ahead,” he tells Yasha, waving a hand around.

Yasha looks relieved with this and smiles a little before speaking. “So you think I need a hobby or something, you’re probably right about that. Its not like I don’t want my own life and you kind of made that possible sort of by accident. So say I do that, find a hobby, or a job, or some friends or something. Will you give me a chance then?” he asks softly.

He wants to say no, he probably should, but instead of doing that he makes his own set of parameters. Its not like he wasn’t used to negotiating, after all- he did it all the time in business. “I have to talk to Bucky,” he says instead of what he should and Yasha rolls his eyes.

“What’s he matter?” he says in an irritated tone.

“You didn’t like being subjected to his private life, did you? If you had a say I’m sure his relationship with Steve would have been a lot different. And barring that he should probably have a say in what goes on with his own damn body, and you should have some kind of stakes in what he does with yours. That sounds complicated but better you than me, honestly. Point is Bucky hasn’t had much choice in anything in over seventy years, neither have you, but having choice now doesn’t mean you should steamroll each other. And also get therapy,” he adds, figuring that last one would be as good as a no anyways but Yasha surprises him by giving him an irritated look but agreeing.

“Don’t look so shocked, Stark. You’re the only thing on this planet that makes me feel something- you think I wouldn’t sit in a shrink’s office for an hour a week to keep that? It’s a small price to pay,” he says. He sounds painfully honest and Tony’s heart squeezes for a moment, surprised by the level of sacrifice Yasha was willing to make for him. But maybe that was because vulnerability never came easy to him, especially not to strangers who could have agendas. It makes this, whatever _this_ is, feel more worth keeping so he nods.

“Then okay- so long as Bucky agrees,” he adds when Yasha looks a little too hopeful.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought hmm. Do I want to wait to post this? No. So I posted it lol.

When Shuri shows up on his doorstep wearing an ‘I heart NY’ sweatshirt Tony sighs. “Please tell me T’Challa knows where you are,” he says.

Shuri shrugs, “he’s aware enough,” she says and that really doesn’t make him feel better about things.

“Kid, you need to tell him where you are before he shows back up here and re-bugs my living room and then complains about my sex life like it wasn’t his fault he had to deal with it to begin with,” he says. “But I’m guessing you’re here for a reason.”

She nods and walks in when he moves aside for her. “Yes- I finally got around to looking up those children that went missing. They are real, but they went missing ages ago so I don’t see how they’re relevant,” she says.

Tony frowns because he’s run five different searches and found nothing of use. “Show me what you have,” he says and Shuri shrugs, pulling a laptop out of her bag.

“From what I gathered, and I’ll warn you that it isn’t much, these kids went missing as early as 1928 and as late as 1952, and none of them are on any kind of record for long,” she says, pulling up a few files. Most of them were bare bones as far as information went and even then Shuri’s findings were mostly circumstantial, but when she gets to the last kid- the one that went missing in 1928- Tony frowns.

“That can’t be right,” he says, nodding at the last piece of evidence Shuri had of her existence.

“I verified the information, thank _you_ ,” she says in an offended tone.

“No, you don’t get it, that’s Natasha standing beside her. Younger obviously, probably in her early teens, but that’s her. I thought you said this one was born in the late twenties,” he says.

“She was, this was taken in 1942. It’s the last time she’s on any kind of record anywhere. I couldn’t even find a death date,” she says.

“Your information _has_ to be wrong- I’m telling you that’s Natasha standing next to her.” And Natasha wasn’t as old as Cap- her birthdate wasn’t too long after his own or so she told him. Or maybe that’s what she was led to believe or something. Or hell, SHIELD could have told her to keep that information to herself, but then why would she have reacted so strangely to missing kids when she knew at least one of them? No, something was going on here.

“My information is not incorrect, I checked things over several times and that was before I spent a stupid amount of time trying to find out where these children ended up. Which I found nothing,” she adds.

Yeah, so did Tony in regards to that, but whatever programs Shuri was running must be better than his own given that she found information no matter how bare it is. “Okay, you know what, I think we need to look up Natasha because there shouldn’t be a record of her in the early forties let alone one that suggests she’s in her early teens. Follow me,” he tells her, turning to go to his lab.

*

Shuri watches as Tony works, finding a shocking amount of information on Natasha Romanov, but the speed at which he determines its useless or not is more than a little impressive. She spent much more time on her own information but Tony seems to be able to figure out how reliable something was far faster than she could.

“How are you doing that?” she asks after some time. She had started going through his discarded sources, positive that he was missing something but her reading was useless because Tony had been right to throw out what he did.

“Knowledge of American media, American spy systems, and the American military and all their operations. It probably takes you longer because you don’t know what would and wouldn’t be a reliable source here immediately. Stuff from other countries takes me longer too though, so its not just you. If you want though you can go through all this stuff- there’s a lot of HYDRA information that someone needs to go through and you probably wouldn’t want to read through that,” he says, waving a hand and bringing up another set of screens and pushing the ones that were previously in front of him over.

She raises an eyebrow, wondering where these things were _stored_ when Tony wasn’t waving them in and out of existence. They appeared all over the lab so she wondered what kind of systems he had set up to do that. Her own designs were segregated to specific areas. She’d ask later though, when she had gone through the files in front of her. She pulls them towards her, surprised when the files do her bidding, and pulls up the first thing in the pile.

The information was mostly useless but she does find a few intriguing things regarding the US military that she files away for later use. She never knew when that information might be useful to her later. Tony flicks through the HYDRA files just as fast as he went through everything else and out of curiosity she catches one he the files he flicks aside, surprised when the file stops and comes towards her. She really wanted to know how to do that.

“You aren’t going to want to read that,” Tony says quickly but he doesn’t reach out and take the file back like T’Challa would.

“It can’t be _that_ bad,” she says.

Tony raises an eyebrow, “Wakanda can’t possibly be ignorant to World Ward Two- Nazis were hardly nice people, Shuri. You’re not going to want to read that, especially since it’s useless,” he says.

“Obviously we know about World Ward Two- Nazis kept trying to invade the country to steal vibranium, convinced it would unlock psychic powers or something. Honestly they were all crazy, and then in the fifties with the weird amount of red heads,” she shakes her head. “But I thought this was an offshoot of Nazis, not actual Nazis.” Or that was how the American media portrayed them when they weren’t either ignoring them and occasionally condemning them.

“Don’t let people fool you- they might have tried to rebrand themselves but if it walks like a Nazi and talks like a Nazi, it’s a Nazi. And these files are from when they were Nazis anyways. So do yourself a favor and throw that out,” he says, gesturing to the file that was still at her fingertips.

“Fine,” she says and flicks it away. “Is there anything useful in those files because most of what I’ve found out from mine were about you technically committing treason by giving me classified information,” she says.

Tony shrugs, “you think you can do anything useful with the knowledge of Rhodey’s random exploits with missing tanks?” he asks, smiling.

“You already went through the files,” she states more than asks.

He nods, “but having more than one person look at information that could be useful sometimes gets results. Guess you didn’t find anything of use?” he asks and she shakes her head.

“Not so far,” she tells him, calling up another file.

*

Tony watches as Bucky toys with his phone, enthused with Snap Chat not that Tony really used it much if ever. He was more fond of Twitter and Instagram as far as social media went but Bucky seemed to be having fun so he didn’t really care. His story had to be looking pretty weird by now but he figures that’ll make for some interesting headlines tomorrow.

“I don’t know why you don’t like this app, I think its fun,” Bucky says, taking what had to be the five hundredth picture that day.

“It just doesn’t appeal to me. But sometimes if I’m bored I’ll snap random fans because they always fall over themselves when they get a personal snap chat from me and I find it amusing,” he says. One man sent him back five straight snaps of him crying at his camera, which was fun. Mostly he got a lot of screaming though.

“Pepper has banned me from sending her snaps,” Bucky informs him sadly and Tony throws back his head and laughs.

“Sounds like her. Want food? Because I’m hungry,” he says.

Bucky perks up, “can I make something? I was looking up recipes online earlier. Also you can order food _online_? Like I don’t have to talk to a human _or_ wear pants?” he asks, looking too excited for his own good.

Tony starts laughing again. “Yeah, Bucky, the future means minimal human contact if you want it that way,” he says. Bucky looks downright _enthused_ with this and Tony shakes his head at him fondly. Unlike Steve Bucky was curious about things, and eager to find some kind of place in his new surroundings. It was too bad Steve was so intent on staying in his past, Tony thinks, because Bucky would probably actually be good for him. Steve was reluctant to live in the future and Bucky was full steam ahead- if things were different Bucky would probably do wonders to reintegrate Steve back into daily life.

“The future is awesome,” Bucky says, grinning at him over the arm of the couch. “But before we get to the food, what are you avoiding telling me? FRIDAY says Steve has stopped calling and so I can’t imagine its that,” he says.

Yeah, but Tony was sure that meant drastic measures were coming but he didn’t really want to burst Bucky’s bubble. He seemed… happier, freer or maybe that was Tony assuming things based on his own perspective. Regardless he should probably mention Yasha… He sighs, “you know what, video worked last time,” he mumbles more to himself than Bucky but with his superior hearing Bucky hears anyways.

He tilts his head to the side and waits for Tony to find the right section of video to show him. “Where exactly are your cameras? Because they seem to be everywhere,” Bucky says.

“They are. I can disable the ones in your space if you want though- the ones in your room are disabled already,” he says distractedly, trying to find the right time of day. Yasha and Bucky seemed to change a lot more frequently now and Tony wonders if there’s a reason but truthfully he had no idea. He wasn’t even sure _they_ had any idea.

“You’d do that?” Bucky asks, obviously surprised.

Tony looks up and frowns at Bucky’s obvious shock, “yeah, I would. Why do you look so surprised?” It wasn’t like Steve had a bunch of contraptions around that intellectually inferior people would call Orwellian. He just felt more comfortable with this technology around him, that didn’t mean he was living in a fucking dystopian novel. Honestly his idea of a dystopia was living with nothing but candles and quills like the Luddites wanted.

“You just seem so… attached to your stuff I guess. I didn’t think you’d give that up,” Bucky says.

“I’m not, I’m just giving you whatever privacy you want,” he says, smiling when he finally finds the right part of the video. “Here,” he tells Bucky, handing over the tablet so he could watch for himself. It was easier to do that than explain what the situation was.

As Bucky watches the video Tony goes to make himself busy elsewhere, giving him room to process his other personality’s request. God knew Tony would want it in his situation. Hell, he could take time to process what the hell was going on in his mind on his own _now_ and he didn’t even have to deal with a whole other person in there. He’s considering rearranging some plants when Bucky finds him.

“He seems… attached to you,” he says softly.

Tony sighs, “he is.” There was no getting around that as much as Tony wanted to. Or maybe didn’t want to, he wasn’t really sure these days.

“And what about you?” Bucky asks, head tilted to the side.

“ _What_ about me?” Tony asks back.

“I mean how do you feel. You kind of gave mixed signals in the video,” he says, looking down at the tablet in his hands.

He opens his mouth to say it didn’t matter but he damn well knows it does. “I don’t know, I thought he was you but it turns out you’re you and… my relationship status always has to be needlessly complicated, doesn’t it?” he mumbles more to himself than Bucky.

“I guess maybe you should think about whether or not that affects how you feel about him. And you feel something, I can see it every time you look at me like you miss him,” Bucky tells him. Tony frowns and Bucky lets out a soft laugh, “you like me well enough, but that’s because you pity me and you find my curiosity intriguing. You don’t look at him like that, like he’s a child who’s learning and you’re amused by it. Don’t look so upset, I get it.”

It hadn’t been his intention to make Bucky feel like a child- he just found is attempts to figure out anything beyond the basics of how to use technology amusing. But he guesses he can see how that would be taken from Bucky’s point of view. “That’s not… I don’t know how to feel at the moment; I’m still trying to figure this out. And I don’t think you’re anything like a child, more like someone who just got thrown into what must feel like a sci-fi film and you’re trying to figure out the rules of your new world. The way you explore your surroundings is what I sort wished I saw out of Steve but instead he… didn’t really take being here very well.” Unlike Bucky he didn’t explore the future more than he had to, only engaging with new things when it was necessary for him to. Bucky spent most of his time asking questions and trying to figure out how to use random things around Tony’s penthouse.

Bucky considers this for a moment before he smiles, “so your amusement isn’t some kind of misguided pity?” he asks, head tilted to the side.

Tony shakes his head, “no, its not. Its more like I appreciate anyone who appreciates technology- most people tend to fear it instead of embracing it.” Just look at all of those stupid movies about robots taking over the world, though after Ultron they sort of had more value. But before that Tony found them absolutely absurd and without a space rock Ultron wasn’t even possible so. Aliens, in his not at all biased opinion, were a lot more fearsome than murder bots.

“So I’ve noticed- Ultron seemed to freak people out. Still, figure out how you feel about Yasha and once you do take it up with him. Ultimately its not my relationship,” he says, shrugging.

“Its still your body too,” Tony points out.

“I know, and if something he does affects the way I live then fine, but I can’t say he can’t have a relationship because I’m in my head too. I don’t get that right and neither does he,” Bucky says. “So when you figure things out, talk to him.”

*

When Bucky left Steve didn’t think he wouldn’t come back. Sure he was upset but Bucky _always_ came back. Actually Bucky never really left but that was besides the point- this time he left and he didn’t come back and Steve _tried_ calling to at least make sure he was okay but Tony eventually blocked the damn calls. So he waited a couple days because maybe Bucky needed space and Steve could do that, really, but it’s been more than a week and how much space could he possibly need? It wasn’t like he wanted to deal with Tony- he had enough problems dealing with his best friend who seemed intent on fighting his every suggestion for the Accords but if Bucky wasn’t going to call, or if Tony wasn’t letting him, then he needed to know what was going on.

He almost doesn’t expect Tony to let him in but he does and Steve isn’t about to question it so he hops in the elevator before Tony changes his mind and he has to do something stupid. When the doors open to Tony’s penthouse Bucky is standing there and sighs in relief, immediately going over to him. Bucky takes a step back and Steve _swears_ he feels his heart get stabbed, “Bucky…” he says softly.

Bucky looks away, “Steve,” he says, tone just as soft. “I’ve got a lot going on right now.”

“I _know_ ,” Steve says, “I’m probably the only one who knows what you’re feeling right now.” Being shot seventy years into the future with no idea what was going on an all these expectations on you wasn’t easy. He knew that better than anyone in a very literal sense what that was like and Bucky needed, someone who understood.

His response earns him a sharp laugh though, “you don’t know _anything_ ,” Bucky says, shaking his head.

Steve frowns, “Bucky, I’m literally the only other person currently alive who knows what you’re going through,” he points out.

“No, you don’t. What you know isn’t anything like what I’m going through Steve and… I’m _tired_ of pretending it is,” he says, shaking his head.

“What, did Tony tell you that?” he asks, rolling his eyes. Of course Tony would claim they were going through something totally different like he had any experience with either of their life circumstances. Why Bucky was buying it, though, was something of a mystery.

“No, Tony didn’t tell me that, common sense did Steve. You went down on a plane and woke up seventy years later. I fell off a train, lost an arm, had an incredibly violent surgery that replaced said arm, got tortured for six straight months until there wasn’t much of me left at all, and then got used as a weapon HYDRA froze when I was inconvenient for them. By the time I woke back up myself I lived entire _lifetimes_ that you could never understand,” Bucky says, shaking his head.

“Then let me try,” Steve says quickly, stepping forward. Bucky sighs and takes a small step back, leaning away and Steve clenches his jaw but he doesn’t say anything. Whatever was going on he could fix this; it was _Bucky_ he was talking to. Even when he had nothing he had Bucky, and Bucky had him too. That would never change.

Bucky tilts his head back and sighs, “Steve, there is no amount of empathy that you could lend this situation that would allow you to understand. I’m not saying that because I don’t think you won’t try in your own way, I’m saying that because understanding isn’t possible. _I_ don’t understand what happened to me, no one else will either,” he says. “And beyond that I’m different now, so are you, and I don’t think we’re compatible anymore.”

He takes a step forward, extending his hand to touch Bucky because he _had_ to understand that this was ridiculous- of course they were different people but they’d always be compatible. They’ve always worked well together, always would. Bucky takes another step back though and he sighs, “I’m just trying to get you to understand-”

“So am I Steve- whatever we had is gone and I don’t think its going to come back unless both of us take time to figure out our lives,” he says.

“And what’s wrong with figuring things out together Bucky, I thought we were doing okay,” he says. Until Tony had to go and screw it up somehow they were happy, content. It had been nice to be wrapped up in their own world, it felt like _home_ and he wanted that back.

Bucky tries to take another step back but he hits the wall behind him and gives it a slightly panicked look over his shoulder before his jaw clenches and he turns back around. “We tried that Steve, and we ended up here so that’s not going to work. I’m sorry but we’re done.”

“Bucky,” he says, leaning forward a little until he hears footsteps and turns to find Tony standing there with his arms crossed over his chest. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Bucky frown and that doesn’t bode well. “What do _you_ want?” he asks, eyes narrowing.

“For you to get out of my house. Bucky was nice enough to let you in and he’s told you you’re done so leave. ‘I’m over you’ isn’t a negotiation point it’s the end of your relationship so _go_ ,” he says.

Steve raises an eyebrow, “oh like _you’re_ the authority on relationships,” he says, scoffing.

“You’re right, I’m not exactly an expert on what makes a great long term relationship. Probably why I know yours is pooched,” Tony shoots back. He doesn’t even realize he’s stepped forward until Bucky grabs his arm, pulling him back a little.

“Steve, its his house,” Bucky says softly.

“And we aren’t done talking,” he says back. “He doesn’t get to cut our conversation short just because he doesn’t want me here.”

“Bucky can leave with you if he wants, just get out of my house,” Tony says, rolling his eyes.

He opens his mouth to say something but Bucky cuts him off, “look, I’ll go because I have a few more things to say, but its Tony’s house so you can’t really stay here if he doesn’t want you here,” Bucky tells him, wincing a little as he says it. Probably because he was too nice to tell Tony to stuff it but he’s always been the nicer one out of the two.

Tony’s eyes flick back and forth between him and Steve before he licks his lips and sighs, “I uh, was going to wait but now seems like a good time to give you this,” Tony says, walking a few steps forward and handing a phone over. Steve frowns at it as Bucky enthusiastically takes the device, grinning. “I couldn’t let you keep monopolizing my phone, Pepper has reliably informed me that I can’t keep redirecting my calls,” Tony says, smiling. “Call if you need anything.”

“He won’t,” Steve says and Bucky sighs.

“I’ll be back,” Bucky tells Tony, pushing Steve towards the elevator before he has time to say something. Namely that he would _not_ be back because whatever was happening here wasn’t going to continue. Whatever this was Bucky didn’t have to stay in it and Steve would make sure he knew that.

*

Steve wasn’t getting it. Actually no, he was _refusing_ to get it and that sounded odd in Bucky’s mind, which made him wonder if the thought was someone else’s no matter how true it was but he’s never been aware of Yasha before so why would he be now? But it would make sense as to why his patience was thinning. Steve has been… pleasant almost, and mostly not domineering, but he was _refusing_ to accept that this relationship was over and…

 _And tell him you slept with Tony you stupid fuck- hit him where it hurts_.

Bucky can’t help but jump a little, breaking attention away from Steve fourth mini rant on their history and his love for Bucky- something he didn’t actually doubt- but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that he loved Bucky so much he seemed damn intent on making sure he was the only thing Bucky had to love back. Steve frowns at him, noticing the difference in behavior right away and Bucky shakes his head, knowing that apparently this was… contact, he guessed, with his other… personality. And he so wasn’t taking that terrible advice either. He had other methods of getting Steve to realize that he was way too far gone to be in a relationship with anyone let alone Bucky.

“So you say you love me,” he starts but Steve jumps in before he can finish.

“I do, and whatever is wrong we can fix it. We’ve always managed,” Steve says softly.

So he’s been reminded several times. “Okay then, give up Captain America, all of it,” he says.

Steve all but leaps forward, pressing his hands to the sides of Bucky’s face, “I’ll do it,” he says immediately. Bucky shakes his head to free himself from Steve’s grip and sighs.

“Do you not see how insane that is?” he asks. “You can’t just give up everything you are for someone- that’s not love. Its creepy and weird and not at all sustainable. You can’t be willing to throw your personhood away for a relationship, Steve. Get yourself together,” Bucky tells him, shaking his head.

“Captain America isn’t who I am,” Steve says, frowning.

“It wasn’t who you were, but it is who you’ve become. And even if you’re right the fact that you’re apparently willing to throw away a huge part of your life for me is messed up. You never would have done this in Brooklyn, Steve. You probably would have told me off and called me a selfish asshole, which would be warranted,” he says. Whoever Steve used to be that person was gone, and so was the person Bucky used to be. Hell, he was so gone there was an entire other person in his head. And he had no idea what was going on with Steve and he didn’t think Steve knew either. But he wasn’t willing to stick around to find out either so he turns to walk away but Steve grabs his arm.

“Bucky,” he says in a somewhat desperate tone, grip tightening a little on his arm when he goes to pull away. “Bucky,” he says again, this time in a more level tone. “We can work this out.”

For a half a second he considers his options before he makes his decision. “No we can’t, I slept with Tony and we’re together now and um. I like him better than you,” he says, pulling his arm from Steve’s grasp and scuttling off while Steve struggled to process that.

 _Well done_ that stupid voice in his head says and Bucky _really_ hoped Tony was serious about his penthouse being able to withstand super soldiers because he just might have to deal with one.


	11. Chapter 11

Tony shouldn’t laugh but the situation was so absurd that he had to. “that’s not at all funny, but the way you said it was kind of funny. Sorry,” he says, wincing.

“This is what I get for following Yasha’s advice,” Bucky mumbles and Tony’s eyebrows shoot up.

“Yasha?” he asks.

Bucky sighs, “yeah. Turns out you might have been right about my knowing about him letting him… leak in I guess. Now that I think this is the first time. In hindsight I’m pretty sure my insistence on seeing you was mostly him. Also I hope this penthouse really is super soldier proof because I really don’t want to see what Steve is going to do next,” he says, wincing.

Tony shrugs, “the good news is that Steve isn’t exactly normal in his assholery so it probably won’t be something… drastic. At least by our standards,” he says. He had a guess as to what Steve was about to do and unfortunately for him it wasn’t going to work. Either way Bucky wasn’t his next target anyways- the easiest way to isolate Bucky wasn’t to go after him anyways. It was Tony who made the better target for several reasons but mostly because he was the only one around who was offering Bucky any kind of support. With him out of the picture Bucky would have little choice but to go back to Steve though Tony doubted he saw it that way.

“Are you sure?” Bucky asks, wincing again.

“I have more experience with this version of Steve than you do so yes, I’m sure. I’m fairly certain I have his next move planned anyways and if I don’t,” he shrugs, “I’m a genius, I can think on the fly. You’re safe here, Bucky.”

*

Tony probably should have guessed it would happen but like a moron he doesn’t so when Yasha looks smug over his coffee mug Tony rolls his eyes. “You still have plenty to do before I consider a relationship,” he points out.

“Well I made a friend earlier so I don’t have that much to do,” Yasha says smugly, taking a drink from his coffee cup. “I’m just happy to know Bucky agreed not to screw up my life. That’s a first.”

“A friend?” Tony asks skeptically, ignoring the rest of that.

Yasha shrugs, “she said she wanted to punch her shitty ex out and I gave her some advice,” he says like this is a normal thing to bond with another human about.

He sighs, “Yasha, please don’t encourage assault.”

“If I punched Steve in the face would you object?” Yasha asks, raising an eyebrow like he has Tony beat there. Which he totally doesn’t.

“Morally yes, but in a more practical ‘I hate you and hope you get hit by a bus’ kind of way no. But you shouldn’t take my advice,” he says.

“Then I’ll continue bonding with people over assault,” Yasha says, grinning as Tony lets out a long sigh. Of _course_ he’d twist Tony’s words into what he wanted, Tony really shouldn’t be so surprised.

“A single friend you offered punching advice to barely counts, but it’s a good start,” Tony tells him.

“I’m lovely, I’m sure I’ll make friends fast,” he says, looking pleased with himself. Tony doesn’t actually doubt that- it was the _kind_ of friends Yasha would make that worried him.

*

The last thing Tony wants to do is leave the house mostly because Bucky seemed to figure out how to talk to Yasha in his head- something Tony had absolutely no understanding of whatsoever, but found endlessly amusing when he watched it happen. Yasha looked like quite like a shocked cat every time it happened and Tony couldn’t help but laugh. Sadly though Rhodey had things he wanted to go over with him in regards to the Accords- things that were more Avengers business specifically. Rhodey did most of his hero work either on his own, with the military, and sometimes with the military but doing his own thing instead of whatever they told him to do. They didn’t much like it when he did that but he was also the only direct connection they had to Tony’s tech and he damn well knew they had people on trying to reconstruct his suit. Too bad they didn’t find Riri Williams before he did.

Still, Rhodey’s business was mostly on his own or through a government system already and he mostly only worked with Tony when he was with the rest of the team. The result was that Tony would know more about laws surrounding Avengers business than he would, at least when things were strictly them. Rhodey seemed concerned about emergency clauses, or the lack thereof, so Tony had offered to go over things and already had a new version drawn up and a long list of concerns to hand Rhodey and an even longer conversation to make sure Rhodey properly understood everything.

He doubted there would be misunderstandings, but knowing them they’d get sidetracked and end up doing something ridiculous like watching every horror movie ever made despite both of them hating horror as a genre and Rhodey insisting horror movies only happened to white people. Which was true and entirely disconcerting for Tony, who liked to think that Italians were immune though Rhodey reliably informed him that they were not and that he would one hundred percent sell Tony out to a demon for zero dollars. He’d be offended but if they ghost wasn’t picky about race he’d actually give the demon money to take him. Or maybe offer Justin Hammer up as a suitable replacement and double the payment because not even a demon deserved to suffer with Hammer.

“Tony,” a familiar voice says and he turns, finding Steve standing behind him. He barely resists the urge to roll his eyes and instead he sighs.

“What do you want?” he asks, looking to cut this as short as possible. Whatever this was he wasn’t trying to make it an event. More like a small blip on his map that he barely acknowledged if that.

Steve assesses him for a long moment before he laughs, shaking his head. “Bucky never slept with you, it was just an easy way to get me to freeze,” he says.

True, which was why he said it, but that didn’t mean Steve’s conclusions were true. And, because Tony was selfish and probably too much of an asshole but it would be a lie to say he wasn’t going to enjoy this just a little. “You’re not wrong,” he says and he _watches_ the relief flow out of Steve’s frame, which really only makes the second part of his statement that much sweeter. “But not about us sleeping together. Just the part where he said it to shock you so he could make an escape. Sorry,” he says, not sounding sorry at all. It was shitty to take pleasure in this he knew, but after the kinds of secrets Steve had kept from him he couldn’t bring himself to feel guilty for telling the truth. He’d earned it after all.

“That is _not_ true. And you aren’t together,” Steve says, shaking his head more in denial than anything.

“Also true,” Tony says, “the part about us not being together, we very much slept together,” he clarifies. For a moment Steve must see red- Tony can see the rage on his face that only lasts about a half a second but unlike most he wasn’t easily intimidated. He’s had more than one man all but literally rip his heart out- it was hard to be intimidated after that. Especially when he doubted Steve would do anything particularly heinous. From what Tony has gathered he played games that were strictly of the mind, which really didn’t bode well when he was dealing with someone who has been playing mind games since he was conceived.

When the rage filters off Steve’s face smug satisfaction replaces it though he does an admirable job trying to hide it. “Congratulations, Tony, you slept with your parents’ murderer. They didn’t die in a car accident, the Winter Soldier killed them,” he says. Interesting, Tony notes, that he avoids saying that _Bucky_ did it but Tony leaves that in favor of laughing.

“I already knew that, Steve. I read the files,” he says, scoffing as he turns to walk away but a tight grip on his arm holds him back. Tony looks down at Steve’s hand gripping his upper arm and back to Steve. “What are you going to do, hit me?” he asks, rolling his eyes like he wasn’t afraid of that. He was but not because he thought Steve would do it- its just that if he did he wasn’t exactly in a good position to fight back at the moment. Thankfully for him Steve wasn’t hard to occupy if needed, all he’d need to do is bring up Bucky.

Steve’s grip tightens on his arm and Tony resists the urge to wince because _shit_ that hurt. He guessed he could thank a lifetime of abuse for preparing him not to react as expected because he manages to keep the pain off his face and judging from the look on Steve’s that only pisses him off more.

“What the hell is going on?” someone new asks. Both Tony and Steve turn to face Rhodey, who spies Steve’s grip on Tony’s arm and quickly picks up the pace. “Well? Anyone care to explain?” Rhodey asks. His eyes flit down to Steve’s grip and then to Tony’s face. It was a testament to how well he knew Tony that he could see the pain there because the look on his face changes completely. “I suggest you skip the explanation and let him go,” Rhodey tells Steve.

For a moment his grip tightens but he releases Tony, who gratefully takes his now numb limb back. Rhodey immediately steps between Steve and Tony, pushing Tony back a little. “I suggest you go,” Rhodey says in a warning tone. Tony sees Steve consider Rhodey for a moment and he snorts.

“If you think you can outdo Rhodey pissed off you’re wrong. Your title from the military was honorary, his was earned. And he didn’t need to become a lab experiment to be special,” Tony adds. Rhodey’s head turns a little to face him- his way of telling Tony to shut up but it was hardly his fault it was true.

“You do _not_ want a media spectacle on your hands right now, and you want me on your ass less. So go,” Rhodey tells him. Steve glares at Tony over Rhodey’s shoulder for a moment but he eventually clenches his jaw and spins on his heel, stomping off like any smart person would when they’ve been outclassed.

Rhodey turns to face Tony when he feels that Steve is sufficiently out of their hair. “Dude, what the hell did you to him?” he asks.

Tony makes an offended noise, “why’s it automatically my fault?” he asks.

“That is so not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that you had your fighting gloves on and I don’t know what you said to make Captain Perfect to consider actually killing you but it must have been something impressive. And probably stupid, but that’s because I know and love you, not because I have any evidence for that,” he says.

He sighs, “I fucked Bucky and knew he killed my parents, which took all the leverage Steve had to get Bucky back into his grasp away. Oh, and also he’s an abuser. Follow me, we have a lot to catch up on,” he chirps, grinning as he walks off. Rhodey makes a confused noise before he runs to catch up.

*

“What the _fuck_ is that?” Bucky asks, sounding shockingly like Yasha as he carefully reaches out and touches Tony’s bruise. The touch is feather light but it still makes him clench his jaw a little. Bucky must notice right away because he immediately pulls back and quietly apologizes.

“I uh… had a little run in with Steve,” he says.

“I thought you said he wouldn’t pull something like this,” Bucky says. “That bruise is _huge_.”

It took up most of his upper arm because the damn skin _around_ Steve’s hand bruised too but that wasn’t something he was worried about. “He wouldn’t- not with you anyways. I’m fair game.” Not that he would go far, Tony thinks, but if he thought a little physicality could scare him off Tony didn’t think he was above that. Granted it wouldn’t do much given that Tony wasn’t exactly afraid of him but he could try his best. Tony knew where he stood now and he’d be prepared next time.

“That is not acceptable,” Bucky says, flabbergasted.

“Its fine, Bucky, and not something I can’t handle.” It wasn’t even odd for his life really, someone was always trying something and to be fair he wasn’t exactly easy to get along with himself.

“Its not fine and you shouldn’t have to handle it!” Bucky counters. “Why the hell did he do this?” he asks, gesturing to Tony’s arm.

He sighs, “he decided to inform me that you killed my parents- he didn’t know Natasha told me two years ago- and wasn’t impressed that his leverage was gone. Rhodey saved me so all is well. Then we got scarred for life when Yasha decided his new hobby was horror movies. Please do that thing where you talk to him and talk him out of his love of gore. I almost had a heart attack when I came home and I have heart problems, that is a very real possibility,” he says. The damn music alone was enough to give him and Rhodey nightmares- they had to share a bed to convince themselves that a demon wasn’t about to eat them.

“Tony…” Bucky says but he shakes his head.

“I’ve faced scarier things than Steve,” Tony tells him. “I’m fine. How are you though? I can’t imagine having a voice going off in your head is pleasant.” Yasha certainly didn’t react well even if his reactions were amusing. But Bucky was the more fragile one out of the two so Tony was more worried about him than Yasha. He was sure Yasha could adjust fine; Bucky on the other hand might need some extra help.

Bucky shakes his head, “you have a bruise that takes up half your arm and you’re asking if _I’m_ okay? And I am, by the way, thanks to you mostly. I found a bookstore not far from here that I like too,” he says, grinning.

Tony smiles, “that’s great. You should ask Rhodey to take you to some local coffee shops, he has a talent for finding great hot drinks.” Rhodey liked to joke that Tony could spend five minutes in any given area and he’d find the biggest asshole in town and piss him off, the local drug dealer, and a prostitute but if you dropped Rhodey in any given area he’d find the best coffee places, the cop in town that was the biggest asshole and then he’d piss him off, and at least two libraries.

“I’ll talk to him after you get through all that Accords business,” Bucky says and Tony groans.

“Curse Steve for screwing that all up. Again. You should also catch up on movies and hopefully you won’t further your absolute barbarianism in movie taste. Who doesn’t like James Bond?” he asks himself more than Bucky. James Bond is an _icon_ and Bucky didn’t like him? HYDRA must have zapped his head pretty good because that just wasn’t possible.

“James Bond is a prick, but there were a few sci-fi movies that caught my interest in your shelves,” Bucky says.

Tony grins, “we should watch Star Wars! It’ll distract Rhodey long enough for me to put off dealing with law things longer given that there’s an entire franchise that’ll take awhile. And my eyes had to witness the prequels so do you,” he says.

“Oh, you’re going to make him watch the _prequels_? Do you hate him?” Rhodey asks Tony, making a beeline for the coffee Tony made, noting that there was none left, and then stealing Tony’s. He ignores his protest and makes off with Tony’s well-earned drink while Bucky laughs.

“I’m sure they aren’t _that_ bad,” Bucky says.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So after the adventure that was this week- namely quitting the job I got and then getting a new one thankfully right away I figured you know what. Post some more. My goal is to have this done before April 9th, when I start my next semester of school but we will see!
> 
> Anyways there's some heartfelt shit in here so yay!

Tony stares at the phone for a long time before he sighs and picks it up. Shuri’s evidence was solid, he found his own evidence too, and things weren’t adding up. Natasha had to know and whether that meant she’d been lying for years or she was unaware that she was way older than she thought she was. Tony had noticed that she didn’t seem to age but thought that she was just aging exceptionally well- Pepper hardly looked older too so it wasn’t exactly unheard of but given Natasha’s actual age, well. Steve and Bucky were the only two people he knew that aged like that.

The phone rings and he hopes that Natasha picks it up but given how things ended he wasn’t so sure she would. He had been confused by her reaction but when he looked up HYDRA files on the Red Room he realized why. Natasha said her past was her own, a repeated phrase she seemed to live by, and after reading what HYDRA had on the program he could see why. He could also see why she had reacted the way she did. If he thought children were going through or about to go through what she did he wouldn’t have been pleased with his immediate inaction too even if he was right to look up the kids. At the very least it would have given them a place to start, though in actuality all it did was give them all more questions than answers.

“You better have information,” Natasha snaps at him and he lets out a breath of relief.

“I do. Namely that you’re either a lot older than you think you are, and all those missing kids? They went missing mostly during World War Two. You knew them, or I think you did,” he says.

Natasha doesn’t speak for a long time and Tony lets her process this. “I thought my information was wrong,” she says eventually, her voice soft.

Tony lets out a small sigh, “Nat, I know this must be hard- I really can’t imagine- but something is wrong here. Something isn’t right,” he says.

“I know,” Natasha murmurs. “But I don’t know where to go from here.”

“Where exactly is ‘here’?” he asks, at least hoping to get her out of wherever she was.

“Germany,” she says and he nods, calling on FRIDAY to get a plane ready to leave.

*

Natasha sits in the passenger seat of the plane looking lost and confused, not something that was popular for her so Tony lets FRIDAY take over. She didn’t have as much flight practice as JARVIS had but she knew how to operate his suits well and she wasn’t entirely inexperienced with planes. The only way for her to learn was to do it and he had faith that even if she managed to mess something up he could fix it. Natasha doesn’t say anything about it either, another rarity given how little trust she had in most anything but herself.

“What happened?” he asks her softly.

She lets out a loud sigh and slouches further into her seat. “I don’t know. I thought I had a trail and then I lost it and- I’m sorry. For the way I reacted to you,” she says, looking away a little.

Tony shrugs, “its fine. I get that you were uh… not thinking straight. Its not like I haven’t been there,” he points out. And usually with much bigger and deadlier results. He had no place to judge Natasha for her reaction.

Natasha remains silent for a few moments before letting out a breath. “I thought I was on to something, but I lost my trail,” she says.

Probably intentional. Tony guesses that she picked up on something whoever was messing with them didn’t want her to find and they had to work to kill Natasha’s interest. “I’ll get Shuri to look into it later. Right now I’m more concerned by the fact that you’re apparently the same age as Steve,” he says.

He hands over his files but he sent the information to her when he had gone to go get her. She undoubtedly already read the information but she goes over it again, fingers lingering on the picture of her with one of the missing kids when they were teens. “I remember her,” she says. “But not being alive at this time. I thought I was born in the eighties,” she murmurs.

So did Tony and that’s what all SHIELD records said. HYDRA records gave her several different birth dates, suggesting they knew she wasn’t born in the eighties but clearly had no clue when she was actually born. “The Red Room was an operation that only ran from just before World War Two to the early sixties. My guess is that no one realized because I uh… maybe possibly definitely hacked into Russian government records with Shuri and uh… stole the information to confirm our theories. But there were some other sketchy programs before that, which is what I think you were initially a part of, and then got put into the Red Room program.”

“You hacked Russia,” Natasha says, staring at Tony like he was nuts. He shrugs and she pinches the bridge of her nose. “Stark, you’re going to get us all killed,” she mumbles.

“Excuse you, they have no idea it was me and even if I didn’t manage to scramble all possible traces back to me, and I definitely did, Shuri definitely would have made sure that hack was completely untraceable.” Her methods were different, and as usual considerably better than his and he was totally taking tips from her. Mostly so that he could keep her out of his systems but you know, still.

“Who is this Shuri person you keep mentioning?” she asks.

“Wakandan princess, very smart,” he says and Natasha raises an eyebrow, smiling wryly.

“Smarter than you?” she asks and he nods.

“Considerably. I’m thinking of introducing her to Riri Williams- kid from Chicago who’s also quite intelligent. She isn’t better than me yet, but she will be. I think they’ll get along but I’m not sure about it. Penny for your thoughts?” he asks, smiling.

Natasha looks shocked, which offends him. He only gave himself the credit he was due, it was hardly his fault that was usually all the credit. And when he was wrong he admitted it- he was wrong about being the only one able to build a mini reactor and he owned up to it. Even if Vankov could eat a dick for all he cared. “I um… have no idea what to do with any of that. What else has been going on? Any new drama in the world of Tony Stark?” she asks, asking for a distraction without actually asking.

Tony lets out a sharp laugh, “yeah, I slept with Bucky, who also has a secondary personality Steve doesn’t know about and also it turns out that he’s been emotionally abusing Bucky since he’s been back. Oh, and Rhodey is ready to eat Steve alive over this Accords business.”

“I _told_ him to go with it- the public needs more trust in us and- you know what I’m leaving that alone because Rhodey apparently wants to vore Steve,” she says, snickering. “And you _better_ have a more detailed account of that entire Bucky thing because that was so not enough information,” she tells him.

He frowns, “what is ‘vore’?” he asks and Natasha’s eyes light up in a way that tells him right away he was going to regret that question.

*

Bucky grins at him, “my weird observations of the modern world have given me a pretty large Twitter following,” he says. Tony, who was following Bucky and got him half that following thanks to that nods because he knew.

“You accidentally educated people on the banana apocalypse,” he says. It wasn’t something Tony even knew about until Bucky tweeted that bananas weren’t right anymore and because he thought Bucky was being dramatic- Yasha didn’t seem to notice a difference- he discovered that the bananas Bucky would have been exposed to weren’t around anymore. Yasha became a thing after this happened so he wouldn’t taste a difference.

“And people like my memes!” Bucky says excitedly.

“You’re actually pretty proficient at using editing softwares,” Tony says. He’s discovered how to make short cell phone videos that were surprisingly dramatic and hilarious and thanks to FRIDAY’s help he figured out how to use a couple different ways to edit videos and pictures. He was surprised by Bucky’s interest in technology but his endless questions were welcome and pleasant. At the moment he was trying to figure out coding and Tony was more than happy to help using Shuri’s coding style. Technically he was learning it too so it made his ability to teach more effective. With other coding style he kept leaving out important information by accident because he forgot said information was important. The risks of having so much information you no longer knew where to start.

Bucky smiles, looking down at the ground for a moment, “thanks,” he says softly.

“You’re welcome. So what meme of yours got popular this time?” he asks, curious.

“A couple random Winter Soldier memes about plumbs. I didn’t think the public would relate so much, they were mostly inside jokes with myself,” he says honestly. “And one about being a cyborg that got pretty popular in a couple disability communities randomly.”

Yeah, Tony was jealous of that but he did appreciate that he didn’t have an arm ripped off in a train accident. He still wished he was a cyborg though. “The plumb memes seem random and amusing to the public- something small and ridiculous that humanizes the Winter Soldier in a way they don’t get anywhere else. Actually given the possible legal action that might be taken against you I’d advise you continue to drop small hints of who you are as a person- humanize yourself to the public. It’ll make viewing you as a cold blooded killer harder and public opinion can go a long way in keeping you from being thrown in jail.”

Bucky frowns, “I’m not sure I should be kept out of jail. Its not like I didn’t kill those people…” he says softly.

Tony shrugs, “so you did, but it’s the circumstances that makes things… muddy. You weren’t acting on your own accord with your own plans. People forced you into it and in a lot of ways you had no choice. So yeah, maybe you killed my parents but not because you wanted to, or even planned to. You were just the weapon HYDRA used,” he says. It had been hard at first to accept that, but it was true. Eventually he learned to accept that and he hopped Bucky could too.

“I should have resisted,” Bucky mumbles, jaw clenching in a mix of frustration and guilt.

“Every person has their limits, Bucky. It wouldn’t have mattered how much you resisted, they would have found that limit eventually. The only thing you’re actually guilty of is being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he says softly.

Bucky considers the ground for a long moment before he sighs. “Do you actually believe that, that I’m not really guilty for killing your parents?” he asks.

Tony sighs, allowing himself a moment before he nods. “I didn’t want to admit it, not at first because I was angry I didn’t know how they really died, and even more pissed off at Steve for not telling me. I’ve always felt guilty about the way I left things with my parents and now I find out that their deaths were even more senseless? I don’t know who I hated more, you or myself. But I needed to know what happened, _how_ it happened. By the time I finished with those HYDRA records I just couldn’t hold you responsible for what you did. I’ve been held captive and tortured too. I know that you give in,” he says softly.

“You escaped. You were stronger,” Bucky murmurs.

“I was lucky enough to have access to materials and a man that gave me enough courage and hope to escape. If it wasn’t for Yinsen I would have died several times over and I never would have gained enough strength both physically and mentally to do what I needed to. You had nothing Bucky, nothing but torture. It isn’t hard to see why we ended up in totally different circumstances.” And Yinsen… he had always planned on dying for Tony and he fucking resented that. Tony was the one who deserved death, still did, and yet innocent _Yinsen_ ended up dead instead. _Don’t waste your life…_ Tony wonders briefly he had failed Yinsen in a way he promised himself he wouldn’t or if Yinsen would be happy with who he became. He was more forgiving than most so Tony genuinely doesn’t know what he’d think. Point was Yinsen was the only reason Tony was here in any capacity, not because he was stronger than Bucky.

Bucky looks down, still guilty. “You’re a better man than you should be,” he says softly.

Tony shakes his head. “I’m not a good man, Bucky. If you knew even a small amount of my past you’d know there’s nothing I can do to make up for what I’ve done- my body count is far higher than yours. But I do try my best to be fair.” Even before, when he was stupid enough to think that people had morals and limits that matched up with his own naïve assumptions he tried to be fair. Granted it was impossible to be fair when you were looking at the world with such rose tinted glasses but he tried to go for a more realistic approach now.

“I know all about your past. Even if Steve didn’t tell me I know how to use Google because FRIDAY taught me- you were the first thing I looked up. So you have a shitty past, that’s not who you are. I’m not convinced that’s who you were either.” Tony lets out a soft laugh, shaking his head at Bucky’s unshakable faith.

“That is who I was, Bucky. Selfish, egotistical, naïve, ignorant- all of it. Some of it hasn’t changed either.” Try as he might but he still saw things in ways that were too… limited by his own world view he guessed. That was why Ultron happened.

“I know selfish people better than most,” Bucky says, “and as much of an asshole as you were, and you _were_ an asshole, I don’t think you were near as selfish as you think you were. I’ve watched interviews; you said you thought people had limits, accountability. For someone with little faith in government systems on the surface you actually held too much faith in them. And in your business partner. That doesn’t read like a selfish person- it reads like a good man with a façade in a world that isn’t nearly as good as he is. You’re a good man, Tony. And I know that because of your interviews, because you took me in without thinking about it, because you went to Germany to get Natasha without a second thought, and because you keep track of young minds with potential so you can help them succeed. Give yourself credit.”

Tony smiles, looking away because he didn’t believe that, but Bucky’s evidence was solid. He wants to explain how none of that really mattered when you spent years of your life warmongering and finding more efficient ways of killing people en masse but he doesn’t. Bucky won’t be convinced anyways because he’s a good man too. “Thank you,” he murmurs.

*

Yasha disliked Bucky on the best of days, but he was growing to dislike Bucky more and more each day. First of all his being stronger cut into Yasha’s time, and it also meant he gave running fucking commentary on Yasha’s life. But mostly he really didn’t like Bucky because Tony liked him too. He didn’t realize it and neither did Bucky, who was also growing feelings he had no damn right to have way too soon after leaving the last dipshit he dated.

Tony notices because of course he does and like usual he brings Yasha tea. “What is it that has you in a foul mood?” he asks, perching on the small outdoor couch beside him.

For a long few moments he considers not saying anything, or lying, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t do that though, instead he sighs. “You have feelings for Bucky,” he states more than asks.

“Yeah,” Tony tells him, surprising him with his honesty. “I don’t like lying. And it helps that you have the same face.”

Yasha resented that too. He doubted anyone would understand how limiting it was to wear the same face as another person. Even twins got the benefit of their own body but him and Bucky? They were two people in one body and that was a hard situation to be in. Thankfully there weren’t more of them in their head. “Why?” he asks, wanting to know more about Tony’s thought process. Sharing a face wasn’t enough to develop feelings for more than one person when they were so different.

Tony shrugs, “I can’t choose which parts of you to love, Yasha,” he says softly.

“I’m not part of Bucky,” he says in a tone that’s a bit too sharp.

“Yes,” Tony says, “you are. Not in a… physical sense, or even a psychological one, but you two are as wrapped up in each other as two people could possibly be. You were developed as a coping mechanism for Bucky- in a way you’ll always be a part of him. And he’ll always be a part of you; you’ve outright stated that he still uses you as a way to escape. It makes you connected in a unique way and sometimes its hard to tell where that line stops, where the two of you stop bleeding into each other. I can’t choose to ignore that, and even if I wanted to it would be impossible. But if it makes you feel better I love you both for different reasons.”

He’s completely unaware of what he said and that’s why Yasha believes it- people had a hard time faking that kind of honesty and he knew the tells. Tony didn’t have them. “You love us both?” he asks and Tony only seems to realize then, making an annoyed face and sighs.

“Yeah. Bucky is eager, curious, intelligent, and soft. Traits that I admire because I don’t share them, at least not the way Bucky has them. And you- you’re passionate, sarcastic, understanding, harsh sometimes, almost aggressive but never in an imposing way. You’re so different from me, from Bucky too, and its… I don’t know how to describe it. But your unapologetic presence is heady, attractive. And the contrast between you and Bucky has its own strange appeal. Like I’m watching two sides of the same person work together and against each other. It’s a powerful thing,” he says, head tilted to the side as he considers this for a few moments.

The way he says it feels earnest, and he struggles to put it into words and maybe that’s why Yasha doesn’t feel like he’s some kind of freak show someone finds interesting for all the wrong reasons. He knew the way people who were different were treated- like they were oddities to look in at, staring as much as they pleased and asking questions people thought they had a right to ask. Tony doesn’t seem to want to look in places he had no right to though- it was more like he had been looking to understand and maybe understood a little too much. Yasha doesn’t like his feelings for Bucky because he’s never been the sharing type. He wonders what Bucky would think too.

“I… wish you didn’t. Love both of us,” he clarifies, staring down into his tea.

“Me too- but it would make things more complicated. I think its best to love you both for all that you are, for what both of you have to offer. If I didn’t I’d worry about how accepting I’d actually be- whether or not I loved only one of you because I didn’t think the other was really there, or if I didn’t like one of you entirely. I think that would be worse,” he murmurs.

 _Its best to love both of you for what both of you have to offer_. Yasha considers the words before he sighs, sitting back in his seat. He’s surprised when Tony moves closer, curling into Yasha’s side. He wraps his arm around Tony right away, pleased when Tony allows himself to sink into the touch. “This is a surprise,” he says softly.

Tony shrugs, “Bucky has been developing his own interests at pretty rapid speeds. You’ll catch up eventually I’m sure, but you have a disadvantage when it comes to social interaction. Bucky already knows how to interact with people; he just needs to relearn how to do it in a modern way. You have to start basically from nothing thanks to HYDRA but you’ll figure out how to do it. You already took an ungodly interest in horror.”

Yasha laughs, “the atheist finds my interests ‘ungodly’, wow. And I know how to interact with people fine, better than Bucky probably. The problem is that I only ever interact with them to get something I want, like I did with you at first. I don’t know how to not do that,” he says softly. Bucky never seemed to want anything in particular when he talked to people and Yasha didn’t know how to emulate that. Tony laughs though.

“People only ever talk to each other because they want something. The problem isn’t that- its that you’re usually more… goal oriented I guess. Try aiming to interact because you like the person’s personality, or you think they’re knowledgeable on a subject you want to learn more about, or because you just want to spend time around them. People still have goals when they talk to others, its just not usually information they’re looking for,” he says.

That… was helpful. He considers Bucky’s interactions, his thoughts that he would catch. Companionship, Yasha decides, is his main goal. He liked being around people in a way Yasha didn’t but knowledge was a suitable goal. He liked learning about new things so maybe he could try that. Or maybe, if he was lucky, he might run into someone like Tony that he just liked being around. He doubts that, but he would consider it when talking to people.

“I love you too,” he says eventually. Tony doesn’t say anything, just presses his head to Yasha’s shoulder and allows the moment to linger.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter isn't as long as I'd like, but I wanted to update! My goal is to get this done in the 5 days I have off from work, but we will see! Also my first real shift at my new job went well so that's nice :)

Tony watches as Bucky edits a video of some kind- kittens it looked like this time- frowning at the screen. It was interesting to watch him work, to see the way he examined the clips he had shot with a camera Tony made him and glued them all together into some usually bizarre narrative. Bucky didn’t seem to like narratives that made a huge amount of sense and it was starting to show in his fucking _bizarre_ movie taste. Tony didn’t like anything Bucky did, especially not weird musicals that also included body parts being ripped out and Paris Hilton for some reason, but he dealt with it. Better than Yasha’s horror flicks. He’d be worried if he wasn’t sure that Yasha had little desire to actually inflict violence unless, for some reason, he felt pushed to. He had reacted worse to Tony’s bruise than Bucky had and honestly that was a feat.

Bucky kept looking at his bruise and for awhile his face was unreadable but eventually it settled into cold disgust. Yasha was just flat out angry and for some reason Tony thought that was better than Bucky’s reaction. Maybe it was because it was obvious that Yasha never had much respect for Steve in the first place so he had nothing to lose when he saw that bruise while Bucky did. Either way Tony felt bad almost for Steve. This situation was his own making but Tony knew what it was like to lose everything you cared about. It was just that unlike Steve he wasn’t so selfish that he took his pain out on others- usually he just took it out on himself to a point where others accidentally got caught up in his shit.

“What are you thinking so hard about over there?” Bucky asks, smiling up at him.

He considers answering honestly but decides against that and goes for what drew his attention to begin with. “I appreciate your ability to edit,” he says. It was crude at best but he had to start somewhere, plus his ability to tell some ridiculous story was kind of funny in a weird way.

Bucky gives his computer screen a skeptical look, “I’m sure you could do better than this and I have it on good authority that you don’t usually work with editing software,” he says.

Yeah, be probably could but that wasn’t the point. “Doesn’t matter, the video itself isn’t what I care about. It more… the curiosity and the willingness to learn something so far out of your comfort zone,” he says.

Bucky snorts, “Rhodey said it was always some weird thing that attracted you. Something no one else would even think of. I um… don’t see the appeal in this,” he says, gesturing to the video in front of him.

“Most wouldn’t when it isn’t skill I’m attracted to. But I um… like when people use the things I make them and unlike the rest of the Avengers you aren’t using weapons. People I care about using things that aren’t meant to at least maim people is kind of my… thing,” he says, shrugging.

Bucky smiles a little, “so you like taking care of people? That’s adorable,” he says and Tony wrinkles his nose. “Make that face all you want but its true now come here, I’m having some trouble with this.” Tony considers not going over to spite Bucky but he goes, sitting beside him and looking over what he had so far.

*

Natasha shakes her head as Shuri Dummy wheels along behind her. “He likes you,” Tony says, nodding to the bot he’s given inexplicable personality traits.

“This is a robot, it has no feelings,” Shuri tells Tony.

Predictably he makes an offended noise, “does so. Well, not like humans but he does have some basic code that’s essentially robot emotions. FRIDAY’s personality and sense of emotions are much more developed, but Dummy still has enough put into him that he has a personality.”

Shuri raises an eyebrow at the bot skeptically and Dummy wheels forward almost apprehensively, claw spinning just a little before he backs off a little and wheels over to Tony’s toolbox. He picks up a wrench and brings it back, poking Shuri in the arm with it. “Tell your robot to keep its wrench to itself,” she says, trying unsuccessfully to wave the robot off.

“He wants you to play fetch,” Tony tells her. Shuri gives the bot another skeptical look before she throws the wrench, eyebrows shooting up in surprise as the bot takes off after it at top speeds. When he finds the wrench he brings it back immediately, handing it off to Shuri. “Be careful, if you throw it too much he’ll decide to play forever and trust me you get bored way before he does.”

Shuri, however, looks _enthused_. “Your robot plays fetch! That is brilliant!” she says excitedly. “I never would have thought of that,” she says, throwing the wrench again.

Tony grins and explains how he did it and, to Natasha’s surprise, his explanation seems to go over her head. She’s watched the two interact, and she’s seen what Shuri can do, and even without that by Tony’s own admission she was the smarter one. So it seems odd to her that Shuri wouldn’t understand his explanation until Tony explains it in a different way with a lot more words she doesn’t understand. The jargon works though because Shuri’s eyes light up as understanding dawns on her. “I am so making robots that fetch!” she says excitedly, throwing the wrench for Dummy again and watching as he wheels after it.

With Shuri entertained Tony walks over to her. “Find anything useful?” he asks and she sighs, handing over the information she knew FRIDAY already gave to him. The best and worst part about being friends with Tony was his technology- FRIDAY would have given him whatever she found relevant. Granted she could tell the AI not to do that and she has, but this time it was easier to have Tony in her business rather than out of it.

“You know I picked up a trail. But… it might be best if you checked that out,” she says begrudgingly. Overemotional wasn’t her thing- it never has been. But lately all of her hot buttons have been pressed and she knew when to leave well enough alone and step back from things some. And Tony, for all his faults, was a good person to help her out in that regard.

He sighs, “I did and things aren’t quite lining up but in weird areas. I think it’s a trap for you specifically, but there’s this weird stuff on the Winter Soldier too but I can’t figure out how Bucky would factor in. Maybe this week’s villain thought you’d go to Steve after getting pissed off at me and this is some weird way to lure him in too?” he asks more than states, frowning at the screen in front of him.

It wouldn’t be a bad choice in subject- the only think that could have possibly lured Steve away from Bucky was more information on Bucky. At least until Tony threw a wrench into things and now she suspected that Steve was a lot more desperate than he let on. That couldn’t bode well for someone with his personality but that wasn’t her business. She didn’t go sticking her dick where it didn’t belong; Tony could deal with that mess.

“Maybe so. But I’ve been going to you since this started, why change things now?” she asks.

Tony shrugs, “because I’m an asshole?” he says.

She rolls her eyes, “if that was a reason to dislike a person I wouldn’t like most of the people I do. You have more technological ability than Steve and a wider circle of influence as well as knowledge on how to use it. And a moral compass that changes to suit your situation best. You fit my needs more than Steve ever would unless I want sheer bravery and a solid punch. Or good PR. This person seems to know me and not know me well in almost equal parts,” she says.

“Or maybe not. Steve’s moral compass is whatever it takes to keep Bucky around,” Tony points out. “This person seems to know that. What I’m curious about is why I haven’t been targeted.”

Natasha laughs, “not everything is about you, Stark,” she says but there’s no heat behind the statement. Actually she was curious too. She and Steve were the more dangerous members of the team, but Tony probably ranked number one as far as danger goes simply because he was ballsy enough to do stupid things on a whim and hope they worked. Both she and Steve took much more calculated risks than that. Plus there was Tony’s genius and wide influence to consider- that only did more to make him someone to target.

“Guess not. I’ll take it though,” he says. “So, we going to follow this lead or what?”

She considers it for a long moment before she nods, “we should proceed with caution,” she says more to herself than Tony. It was a rare occasion, she thinks, that she needed that reminder more than Tony did but she accepts her fate.

“Alright. I’ll see if anything else useful pops up before we make another trip halfway around the world,” he says, reaching out to squeeze her shoulder before walking away.

*

Tony is surprised when Shuri’s eyes light up in shock and glee. “That is _amazing_ she says and he frowns as the suit covers his body. Amazing for what he had before, yes, but considering what _she_ had? Not really.

“You made T’Challa’s entire suit come out of a necklace, this came out of a bulky sweater. This should not be impressive by your standards. Except for maybe the shape shifting part,” he says more to himself than her. That had been a nice blend of alien tech that Peter had found not long ago that he chose to study. It wasn’t like any US agencies knew what the fuck they were doing with it and if people who were going to use the tech to rob people and whatever someone needed to figure it out. So he was drafted to figure it out and it didn’t take long. So if he stole some alien ideas an implemented them, well, that was the price of learning new things and the government should have expected that.

“Yeah, but I have vibranium and I’m smarter- I mean no offense by that either. That and absolutely _no one_ is even remotely close to this level of advanced. It’s not often that anyone comes close to achieving technology like mine. Actually this is the first time that has ever happened so sure, technically my tech is better, but that doesn’t make yours less impressive considering your circumstances,” she says.

Tony shakes his head, impressed with her ability to look past her own ego. It wasn’t a trait he usually shared. “Thanks. To be fair you’re the only person I’ve met so far that’s surpassed me so. Though Vankov was probably on par or close to it. Also it can shape shift!” Tony says, holding out his arm as the gauntlet melded into a canon.

Shuri’s eyes all but bug out of her head, “okay _that_ is cool! I can’t do that! Can you teach me how to do that? How did you figure it out?” she asks, seemingly unaware that she was asking a series of questions all at once.

“I may have stolen a few ideas from aliens. The government was dumb enough to trust me with all this weird tech and if I learned a few things well, they didn’t say I couldn’t steal their ideas,” he says and Shuri laughs.

“You are exactly the way people should be. T’Challa complains about rules and diplomacy but he secretly likes it. Personally I only find rules as useful as the situation I find myself in but that’s me,” she says, shrugging.

He snorts, “I’m the same way and people don’t really get being for or against something mostly because it suits you in the moment. People say I don’t stand for anything, I say what I stand for can’t be quantified in basic laws and regulations. That and there’s an exception to every rule and I like finding exceptions,” he says. That didn’t mean he didn’t stand for anything, or that he refused to take some kind of stand- it just meant that he knew whatever he stood for meant he was going to need to break rules. Also he didn’t like rules, they were for the boring and totally average, not the exceptional.

Shuri nods, “finally someone who gets it. And what is _with_ people being so content with things that work? Just because it works doesn’t mean that’s the best way and if it isn’t the best way- and there’s _always_ a better way- than why settle for whatever you have? T’Challa thinks that if things are not broken we shouldn’t fix them, but I think all things are broken in some way and that we should be in a constant state of fixing them,” she says matter-of-factly and Tony smiles.

This was the kind of person that was going to lead the future. It wasn’t hard to see why she was so advanced already- her thought process was the same as his and with her heightened intelligence, well. She was born to change the world. “I have someone I want to introduce you to after this is all dealt with. I think you’ll get along,” he tells her, hoping that maybe Shuri would be able to make it past Riri’s cool exterior. It was hard to relate to peers that you were so beyond in every way though, so Shuri would be a pleasant surprise. It might actually be the first time Riri might have to ask for someone to repeat themselves to learn. That would be good for her, he thinks. And then he thought both of them could benefit from meeting Peter, who might get Riri out more and Shuri would mostly encourage it. Plus Peter could learn from the two of them and maybe they could figure out how to keep Peter from losing his backpacks constantly.

*

Generally Tony didn’t go to the kitchen late at night but he was thirsty so that’s where he found himself. What he doesn’t expect is to find Bucky- and it _was_ Bucky- already in the fridge with what he could only describe as petals around his head. Bucky looks back at him for a few seconds, arms full of food before he scuttles off, kicking the fridge door shut behind him as he goes.

He frowns for a few moments before he speaks. “FRIDAY, did I just see Bucky wearing a flower around his head or like… am I hallucinating?” he asks the AI.

“You are not hallucinating but you are in need of sleep,” the AI tells him.

“Bucky was dressed as a fucking flower FRIDAY, how do I sleep without figuring out why?” Was this like… a meme he saw? Were people dressing up as flowers now? After eating tide pods nothing would surprise him.

“Sir, you’ve been awake for more than two days, please sleep,” the AI says. Tony sighs and shakes his head, resolved to figuring out why Bucky was a flower tomorrow.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This sucker is almost done! Probably only a couple more chapters, we will see. Either way it'll be done soon :)

Tony was stressed, Yasha knew, because of all things he spent more time in a suit. He’s long known that Tony used suits as a way to hide himself in a way but dressing for stress was new to him. He knew the habit wasn’t unusual, though, because Natasha didn’t show any kind of reaction to indicate that Tony’s behavior was unusual. If anyone would know she would, he reasons.

But Tony’s stress was half the reason for his current actions, that and he was tired of Bucky getting all the attention. So he was a bit of a jealous asshole and kind of selfish for it, he wasn’t entirely unusual. Turns out people either tended to prefer monogamy too, though probably not because they were worried their other personality was going to take over their life.

When he walks into Tony’s lab he looks up, smiling. “You wear glasses?” he asks, causing Tony to wrinkle his nose and all but throw them off his face.

“No,” he lies and Yasha laughs.

“I literally just saw you in them, why are you lying?”

“Because I hate the way I look in glasses. I look like one of those stereotypical nerds in old shows,” Tony mumbles, giving the glasses an offended look.

“Well I think they look cute,” Yasha says honestly. “Plus if you need them to see maybe aesthetics aren’t important.”

“Aesthetics are always important,” Tony says in a prim tone, “but I’m guessing you’re here for a reason. You don’t wander down here much.”

That was true, he guessed, unless Tony had something to do in regards to his arm. Technically Tony always had something he could improve, but Yasha didn’t really care either way if the arm worked. Tony was just a perfectionist to a high extreme. “Uh…” he says, not sure how to do this. “Here,” he says, throwing the flowers he brought Tony on his desk.

For a moment Tony examines them, head tilted to the side and then he smiles, reaching out and gingerly lifting the flowers off the desk. “You brought me flowers,” he says softly, sniffing them.

“Yeah uh, I’ve been reliably informed that that’s like… normal.” His single friend, if you could call her that, has given him all sorts of advice he was sure was terrible but this particular life advice seemed good given Tony’s reaction.

“I’ve always wanted flowers but no one has ever bought them for me,” he says, smiling down at them. Yasha shakes his head, wondering how it was a guy with literally everything anyone could ever ask for and then some could want such a small, useless thing and somehow not end up with it.

*

Shuri and Tony exchange a look, something T’Challa definitely notices but doesn’t say anything about. As it turns out her trip to America sort of turned into a trip around the world thanks to Wakanda getting a little more lax at the boarder, which T’Challa knew about, but apparently didn’t seem to know that Shuri spent more time in America poking fun at Tony’s tech at least until she found out his tech could play fetch. Then she thought Dummy was cool, which, _rude_. Tony told her to respect her elders because Dummy probably had a good decade on her.

“Are you sure you should go ahead?” Shuri asks, apparently more brave than Tony was because he wasn’t about to ask Natasha that.

Natasha sighs, “I won’t do anything without backup,” she says. Shuri looks to Tony and he frowns for a second when T’Challa follows suit, then realizes he was officially the authority on Natasha’s behavior apparently.

“What do I look like, her keeper? Pretty sure I’d be dead if I even tried, but if you’re asking if I think she’s telling the truth I think lying about staying put when you’re not planning to when you have no perceivable motivation to do otherwise is pretty stupid. Yeah, she’s probably not lying,” he says when both Shuri and T’Challa frown at him. Natasha rolls her eyes; clearly irritated that Tony was the authority on her actions now. Off to the side Bucky doesn’t say anything either way. He can see that Bucky had an interest in the conversation, but he obviously doesn’t want to voice his thoughts to the room.

“It would be useful to have someone go ahead. We’ve all acknowledge that this feels… staged. If it is maybe my presence will draw a reaction so we can get ahead of whomever is calling the shots,” Natasha says.

It’s smart, Tony thinks, but T’Challa and Shuri give him another look. “What?” he asks, inexplicably looking behind himself. Obviously he doesn’t find anything interesting there.

“Well what do you think?” T’Challa asks.

“Why are you asking me? This is Natasha’s specialty,” he points out. T’Challa and Shuri just continue to look at him and he eventually he lets out a long sigh. “Like I said, this is Natasha’s thing but I think her plan has merit. Theoretically we could get a reaction and if anyone is going to be able to handle this it’s Natasha,” he says.

“You remember that she was compromised, right?” T’Challa asks but Tony rolls his eyes.

“In a fit of fear I ran some tests on a rock with a coworker and accidentally created a genocidal AI that nearly succeeded in his goal to destroy the world yet you’re still looking at me like an authority figure. Natasha on a bad day has a clearer head that I do on a good day so that doesn’t really matter to me much.” That and she was faster at self reflection than he was, she knew where she went wrong and he knew she’d be careful to avoid making that mistake again. She’s a spy- it wasn’t in her nature to indulge her emotions and Tony didn’t really need to read files on the Red Room to know she had been trained out of that habit. Besides that Natasha had the most to gain out of keeping her cool. It wasn’t like any of the rest of them had solid evidence that they were ninety with no knowledge whatsoever of the first near forty years of her life.

Across the room Natasha smiles just a little and nods towards him, “thanks for that. I’m leaving in a few hours,” she says and Tony nods, confident that she’ll be fine. With that she leaves the room and T’Challa sighs.

“Shuri has more faith in you than her,” he explains and Tony shakes his head.

“Shuri has spent more time with me and has a lot in common with me. Obviously she likes me better- no offense. But Natasha is the most competent member of the Avengers team when dealing with these things, I’m just the benefactor and the tech guy.” Hell, even _Steve_ had better authority on this kind of thing than him though Tony would be able to think himself out of a bad situation faster and with more efficacy than Steve and sometimes Natasha could. That was just because he was better at quick math though, not because he was particularly good at problem solving in a more… practical sense.

T’Challa tilts his head to the side, “Shuri doesn’t put her faith in people very often, I’d give yourself more credit than that,” he says.

Tony gives T’Challa an unimpressed look, “no offense, but I’m not in the business of taking advice from kings who bug my house and then complain about my sex habits. Also Shuri was polite enough to leave one of those bugs behind and I figured out how to jam the signal so I wouldn’t try that twice,” he tells the king. T’Challa looks surprised, but not as surprised as Shuri. He knew the feeling of being surprised by someone doing something that he didn’t think was possible, but she underestimated how much he disliked being spied on. Plus deconstructing her bug had taught him a surprising amount of information about how it worked so figuring out how to block the signal hadn’t been as difficult as he thought it was going to be.

“I suppose I earned that,” T’Challa says softly, looking away.

“You definitely earned that,” Tony tells him, “and Natasha is a spy that’s probably only rivaled by your guards, she’ll be fine.”

*

Bucky steps in front of him as he goes to step out the door and Tony frowns, “what’s this?” he asks, surprised that Bucky would be so… bold. Usually he was much more passive than actively blocking Tony’s path and glaring down at him.

“This isn’t a good idea,” he says and Tony sighs.

“Every troll has its use, this is Steve’s. Its not like he’s my ideal choice,” he points out. He wasn’t even Tony’s first choice but Natasha trusted Steve’s ability more than Clint’s and Tony had to agree there. Clint was good, but they didn’t know what they were dealing with so it made no sense to bring a guy who’s main expertise was a weapon that was older than dirt. Plus Clint retired, Natasha felt it was best to keep him out of things and Tony agreed.

“You’re going to get hurt,” Bucky says and Tony sighs.

“That’ll happen whether or not Steve comes. It’s the nature of the job and to be blunt I’m not going to give it up- that ruined my last relationship and that was no one’s fault, but consider that.” Pepper couldn’t handle the stress and he didn’t blame her, but he wasn’t much willing to go through all this again.

Bucky sighs, “that’s… not what has me worried. You _do_ remember that the only thing that saved you from Steve the last time you had an encounter was Rhodey, right?” he asks.

“He saved me from a pathetic intimidation tactic that Steve should know wouldn’t work on a guy who once threatened terrorists on national television and followed it up with his home address. As if a little arm grabbing would get me to dump you,” he says, rolling his eyes. What a pathetic attempt at getting Tony to do what he wanted.

“Okay, you know what, then I’m coming with you,” Bucky says and Tony opens his mouth to respond but Bucky cuts him off. “I doubt he’d try anything stupid in my presence, he’ll probably spend most of his time trying to win my affections.”

Tony shakes his head, “you shouldn’t have to do that, and not because you think I’m not safe. I have my suit and it’s much cooler than my last suit,” he says. It was still in fledgling stages- there were a lot of bugs to work out- but now was as good a time as any to test it. Their current villain seemed to prefer the underground method of fighting and Tony preferred the regular attacks. He knew how to handle those much better than whatever the hell this was.

“Your suit would be the only thing saving you,” Bucky says softly.

“Give me more credit than that, I’m not stupid and I _do_ know how to fight contrary to popular belief. If Steve really wanted a fight it would probably be a pretty even match if for no other reason than my ability to think faster than Steve can punch. I’ll be fine, Bucky, you don’t need to follow me around to ensure that. And T’Challa is coming with me anyways so technically I have backup,” he adds when Bucky doesn’t look convinced.

He raises an eyebrow, “the guy that bugged your house? I’m supposed to trust _that_ guy?” he asks and Tony sighs.

“In his defense he seemed genuinely regretful of that.” As he should be, Tony notes, but still. Bucky gives him a _look_ and Tony sighs, “he seems a lot less pissy since his sister took a liking to me. It’s pretty clear he has a lot of respect and trust for her that’s thankfully now translated to having some kind of weird faith in me.” Not that he agreed with that but he wasn’t the one with a faulty trust system. Okay actually he had that problem too but not really the same way.

*

This was not his idea of a good plan but Natasha insisted so here he was. Tony knocks on the door, aware of T’Challa’s presence behind him as he does so. Despite Bucky’s worries he was sure this was only going to end in minor disaster. He’s surprised when Steve opens the door so fast but when his face goes from hopeful to pissed he knows why. He barely resists the urge to roll his eyes and instead takes a breath. “I’m going to need your help,” he says, barely able to keep a bitter tone out of his voice.

Steve lets out a sharp laugh, “what the _hell_ makes you think I’m going to do _anything_ for you?” he asks.

“Nothing, but its not me you’re doing the favor for its Natasha. Trust me when I say if I had a choice I wouldn’t be here- but Nat said you were her best bet at making sure things go well so here I am. There’s a lot you don’t know,” he says.

“Yeah, seems so, like the fact that apparently you were fucking my boyfriend,” he snaps. “Did he tell you that?” he asks T’Challa, looking over Tony’s head. He does roll his eyes at that because that was fucking dramatic and totally unworthy of being spoken out loud.

T’Challa looks a touch uncomfortable and sighs, looking away. “I uh… was an unfortunate witness to that,” he says in a low, embarrassed tone.

“And its also none of his damn business what either of us do with Bucky. So cut the shit, are you going to help me help Natasha or are you going to continue this pity party you’re throwing for yourself?” he asks, losing his patience a little. Steve shifts forward a bit, giving him a downright _murderous_ look and to Tony’s surprise he hears T’Challa shift behind him. A brief glance over his shoulder reveals that he’s looking at Steve and leaning slightly closer to Tony. It’s a clear way to say that he’s prepared to defend him if necessary and Tony finds it odd from a guy who invaded his house once to get information but he leaves that for now.

“There wouldn’t _be_ a pity party if you hadn’t messed my life up sticking your nose and your dick where it doesn’t belong,” Steve snaps.

Vulgar, Tony notes, doesn’t look very good on him. It felt so out of character from the holistic, goody-goody Tony was used to but then he knew better than most that people could be masters of disguise. He’s spent his whole life wearing some kind of mask, or in his later life metal suits, to hide who he really was, how he actually felt. Turns out Steve’s mask was a badly made costume with an American flag theme.

“Answer the damn question, Steve. I don’t have time for you to wallow in a situation that was half your making to begin with,” he says.

“You’re going to go,” a new voice adds and Steve whips around, revealing Bucky standing behind him in the middle of Steve’s living room. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that he obviously climbed the fire escape though why Steve didn’t hear that was a mystery. T’Challa at least had the benefit of assuming it was someone else who lived in the building, Steve not so much. Though he guessed his focus on Tony might have been distracting.

Steve goes to open his mouth to respond to Bucky but he shakes his head, “you’re going because I want you to,” he says and Tony’s eyebrows shoot up. This was more a tactic he’d expect out of Yasha, not Bucky. Manipulation wasn’t really his thing and it showed but when he glances past Steve at Tony he knows why he did it and sighs. Guess he wasn’t the only idiot who did dumb things for all the wrong reasons.

*

“Can FRIDAY actually fly this thing or are you trying to kill us all?” Bucky asks, glancing around suspiciously.

Tony laughs a little, shaking his head. “FRIDAY can fly the plane- she’s still learning but her margin of error is much smaller than mine and I’m the one who built this plane so keep that in mind before you look horrified,” he says.

Bucky doesn’t look less suspicious but that wasn’t unusual with the exception of Wakandans. They seemed much less suspicious of their technology and were very fond of their tech leader though Tony thought Shuri was difficult not to love, not when she was so exuberant and full of personality. Still, Wakanda was less ‘robot overlords’ and more ‘technology has good uses’ and Tony wonders how much vibranium has to do with that. The metal seemed to have _much_ wider uses than Tony even thought possible and that was information he gathered just from things Shuri has alluded to in their conversations not to mention what he’s seen.

“Fine, I’m sure your AI won’t crash us. Mostly. And for the record I still think Steve being here is a bad idea,” he says softly.

Tony sighs, “he’s only here because of you,” he points out. “I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been able to convince him to come along mostly because I’m uh… not exactly pleasant when talking to him. Never have been, its kind of a personality flaw.” He probably should have known that given their first real interaction was a fight but he wasn’t well known for learning fast when it came to human interaction so.

Bucky considers his words for a long moment before he sighs. “This is stupid, I know it is. Starting a new relationship right after getting out of a bad one isn’t a good idea, and that’s not even considering having an entire other _person_ in my head and everything else that’s going on but I can’t really help liking you. Especially after Steve. Maybe he didn’t intend for things to end up the way they did, I like to hope not, but either way he’s not really someone I recognize anymore, and compared to you, well. That’s not even a competition really.”

Its weird being on the positive end of that. Usually when people made comparisons between him and Steve he was the disappointment, not the shining star. “Well, lucky for you I’m not exactly much smarter or known for avoiding risks. Besides, you’ve been doing just fine figuring yourself out so this is probably less of a stupid idea considering that,” he points out. Oddly it was Yasha who was struggling but Tony supposed he should have anticipated that. He was born in a HYDRA lab as an assassin- just because he had a bright personality and was upfront about who he was didn’t really mean he knew how to function.

“You’re actually a lot smarter, but I can appreciate your risk taking at the moment,” Bucky says, smiling down at him. “And for the record you’re more my type than Steve anyways, at least now. Actually he used to be a lot more like you- small and ready to kick anyone’s ass, even his own ass. If you met him then you’d probably get along a lot better with him than… whoever he is now.” Bucky shakes his head, looking away for a moment and it occurs to Tony that Steve wasn’t the only one who’s lost everything.

He reaches out and squeezes Bucky’s arm, “I’m sorry, Bucky. I… its must be hard, all of this,” he says, waving a hand around him.

“Sometimes,” Bucky agrees. “But I actually like the future a lot better than the forties, less pretending to like women and more actual human rights. And you, of course. God knows I wouldn’t find someone else who’s so accepting,” he says, shaking his head.

“You would,” Tony says, “find someone accepting. I’m definitely not the only accommodating person in this era, but I am probably the smartest and most attractive unless you count Shuri, she’s smarter. But I’m definitely the cutest,” he says, grinning.

“Fine, maybe someone else would understand what the hell is happening in my head, but they wouldn’t be you and that’s a travesty. I’m rather fond though uh… I don’t really know how Yasha would feel about this,” he says, wincing.

Not pleased, Tony knew, due to lingering insecurities but he was sure he could smooth those over anyways. Yasha’s worries mostly centered on him deciding that at some point he’d like Bucky better and ignore his existence and that would never happen. His reasons for loving Yasha were different from his reasons for loving Bucky and he was certain he wouldn’t want to live without either of them or their strange versions of love for him. Or general fondness in Bucky’s case, Tony was happy to wait for actual love to foster there.

“Actually I already talked to him about this- I can’t say he’s happy about it, but he understands. Most of his problems are things you can’t help anyways, I’ve got it,” he says. Yasha needed reassuring that he existed, and that Tony wasn’t going to stop believing that because, like everyone else, he saw Bucky as more legitimate than him. It wouldn’t be a difficult job really; it wasn’t as if Yasha was shy and that was half of what Tony loved about him.

Bucky smiles, shaking his head. “And now you’re solving problems I didn’t even anticipate having, wow. You really do make my life easier,” Bucky says.

“I try,” Tony tells him, smiling back.

They stand there for a moment somewhat awkwardly before Bucky reaches out, carefully tracing his fingers along Tony’s jaw, reminding him of the first time they kissed. “You really are amazing,” Bucky murmurs. He leans forward, kissing Tony softly, letting it linger for a moment before he pulls back. Tony laughs quietly and looks away, catching sight of someone in the doorway. He looks closer and steps in front of Bucky when he finds Steve there looking more hurt than he had a right to. He was the one that made this mess; he shouldn’t look so upset to find things didn’t go his way. It was about time that something went wrong for him.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Second last chapter! Next chapter includes some deleted scenes because I wanted to write them out. I'm not abundantly happy with the end, but that's what future edits are for anyways :)

Tony curls up in Bucky’s lap despite the more than inopportune time because he was going to enjoy his calm before the storm. He thought maybe Steve might have reacted badly to finding him and Bucky but Bucky didn’t seem to want to take chances with it so when Steve stepped forward he turned and walked away. Tony obviously followed because he didn’t want to see Bucky get hurt or get hurt himself by staying behind. Now though Bucky presses his face into the top of Tony’s head and sighs, “maybe I should apologize to Steve,” he murmurs and Tony snorts.

“For what? Kissing me instead of him? Because that’s what he’s mad about,” Tony points out. “And… in the interest of honesty my initial interest in you- technically Yasha- was mostly just to piss him off. You’re all he has and he lied for two years to me about you murdering my parents without knowing Nat already told me. And did his best to manipulate me into using my resources to find you. I eventually agreed because it made sense to find you but you should know about my initial motivations. Yasha already knows, but it occurs to me that you didn’t.” Not that he wanted to confess that twice, especially not to someone who would be far less understanding of such a selfish motivation but he deserved to know. Lies never ended well, even if they were by omission. If he’s learned anything he’s learned that.

Bucky looks hurt, which he expects, but then he frowns. “When did that change?” he asks.

“When you came to me- literally, you. Before it was always Yasha and I thought… thought it was a different side of you. Technically I wasn’t wrong but still, at least on a conscious level the way I felt about you changed. And I’m sorry by the way; it was selfish of me to use you as a pawn in my own vendetta. Its not exactly my proudest moment.” Actually it might make his top ten regrets and that was a fucking feat when he spent most of his life war profiteering and also once accidentally made a genocidal AI that nearly wiped out the whole planet after five minutes on the internet.

Wow, his life is needlessly dramatic.

“That is an _asshole_ move,” Bucky tells him, looking disappointed enough that Tony feels his heart squeeze.

He nods, “I know,” he says. There wasn’t much more to say about that, he knew at the time it was a shitty thing to do and like always his bas decisions came around to bite him in the ass.

Bucky remains silent for a long few moments, “you could have never told me and I wouldn’t have known better,” he says finally but Tony shakes his head.

“Lies always come back around, and even if they didn’t what’s the point of being in a relationship when one of the people in it doesn’t even know how it started?” he asks.

“You tell me a lot of things you don’t have to,” Bucky murmurs, frowning a little. “I… still think that was shitty but I appreciate the honesty. And probably need some time to digest that,” he says.

Tony nods, “okay,” he says and he moves to get up but Bucky pulls him back in.

“Time, not distance,” he says and Tony laughs a little nervously.

“I’ll take that,” he says, settling back into his spot in Bucky’s lap.

*

T’Challa and Tony exchange a look. “Do you know if her information is good?” he asks and Tony sighs, resisting the urge to roll his eyes.

“Both Shuri and I were able to locate the bunker she was talking about. Whatever’s in it, well, that’s anyone’s guess at the moment. Whatever is in there was important enough that most HYDRA records of it were erased and all Shuri found was that it existed.” He went through HYDRA records himself- Shuri shouldn’t have to read Nazi ramblings- but even with both of their considerable resources they couldn’t find much. For the first time since they started working together Shuri found less than he did.

“So we don’t know what we’re walking into?” T’Challa asks, raising an eyebrow.

He sighs, “at the moment no. But we’ve faced everything from aliens to bank robbers, whatever this is I doubt our not knowing will make us less effective,” he says. Between Natasha and Steve’s strategy skills, his ability to think faster than everyone else except maybe T’Challa combined, T’Challa’s badass tech and intelligence, and Bucky’s potential knowledge on the bunker they’d be fine.

“Then lets go get this over with. I am tired of being led around like a dog on a leash,” T’Challa says, a touch of anger leaking into his words. It’s the first sign Tony has gotten from T’Challa that he was still grieving since he all but broke into his house, but more so it was a sign the king was clearly still pissed. Tony didn’t envy whomever was behind this that was for sure.

*

When they get to the bunker Natasha notices the palatable hate between Tony and Steve first, and the obvious nervousness Bucky was holding in. She glances between them, trying to determine if this was going to be a problem but when she catches Steve’s eye he gives her a small nod. Whatever was going on with him he was at least going to cooperate for this. For that she’s grateful.

“Are we prepared to go in?” she asks, looking out at the cold bunker.

She looks to Tony and T’Challa as she says it and Tony nods immediately, but T’Challa looks at him. “You’re sure about this?” he asks and Tony, who apparently has run out of patience, rolls his eyes.

“You followed me all the way here, whatever this is it feels… final. We’ve been strung along enough so uh, guess we should see what this is,” he says, looking up at the building. T’Challa nods and they all step forward, Bucky trailing behind a little for reasons Natasha would like to know. She could see recognition there and she was curious about that, but for now it wasn’t relevant.

When Tony reaches her she smiles a little, “thank you,” she says softly. How he managed she had no idea but that didn’t matter. Plus it was Tony- she’s never met someone with a will so strong. Whatever he wanted he got, which was probably why he should be careful what he wished for.

“You should probably thank Bucky. Pretty sure without him I would have had to get T’Challa to save my ass,” he says in a low tone. Not low enough to avoid super soldiers overhearing if Steve’s cocked head was any indication but she doubted Tony cared much about that.

“I’ll thank him later,” she murmurs. “Right now we should figure out whatever the hell this is.” T’Challa wasn’t the only one tired of being led around like a dog. It wasn’t often things got to her- she’s long been trained out of that- but this… whomever this was she has to admit they were brilliant in all the worst of ways.

Tony nods to her and they continue on, getting to the door and finding it slightly ajar. Steve turns to Natasha and frowns, a sentiment she shared, but she nods for him to open it. Carefully he pushes the door open and T’Challa slips in before anyone could say anything.

“It’s clear,” he calls out softly and Steve turns to face her right as Tony steps in.

“Seriously?” she hisses at him as Steve turns to glare after Tony.

“Wakanda has tech that’s _way_ beyond what I have. If he says its clear I trust him,” Tony says from inside the bunker. Natasha raises an eyebrow but follows, ignoring the dirty look she gets from Steve for dong so. Whatever his issue with Tony was this week- besides the obvious Bucky drama- he could put it aside and deal with it for another few hours while they dealt with this.

Tony lifts a hand and light shines from his palm as they continue to walk down the hallways of the bunker. Natasha snorts softly, “you’re a fucking flash light,” she says, earning a _look_ from Tony.

“If you want to stumble around in the dark I’m happy to let you do so,” he says, shaking his head at her.

“She’s enhanced,” T’Challa says softly from behind them. “The only one stumbling around would probably be you.” Natasha barely manages to suppress her laugh at that, especially when Tony’s offended noise fills the hallway.

“Rude,” Tony tells him, shining his light around another corner. “Also Villain of the Week could have picked a bunker that doesn’t smell the way I think Mothman would,” he mumbles. Natasha can’t help the snort at that.

“You think Mothman would smell like metal, dust, human desperation, and a little urine?” Bucky asks. “You have an overactive imagination.” Natasha had to agree but she’s known about Tony’s overactive imagination for years. Sometimes she had no choice but to listen to it too and while she appreciated that Pepper was well taken care of in bed she didn’t really want definitive proof of that. Or of Tony’s creativity in non Mothman related areas of his life.

“You guys are lacking in imagi- whoa,” he says softly, raising an eyebrow as he round another corner and Natasha does too, when she sees what’s in the room.

Five tanks, or what looked like tanks, with people in them. Natasha didn’t need to get too close to know that they were dead- living people weren’t that pale. “What the hell is this?” Natasha whispers.

“No need to stop at the doorway,” a voice says and she exchanges a look with Tony. “Like it? They were Winter Soldiers- don’t look so surprised- Bucky couldn’t have wracked up that many bodies on his own. They weren’t as easy to control though. Pity. But they do serve as a useful bit of foreshadowing. Do remember them, Barnes?” the guy asks. Natasha spots him behind glass in the center of the room looking out at them and she frowns, looking around for some kind of trap. Setting five Winter Soldiers lose on them would have been a good plan, so this guy obviously had something better. And Bucky, though she didn’t want to admit it, was better than her when it came to spying and killing.

They turn to face Bucky, who looks pale and shaken, and he shakes his head. “I… only vaguely remember this place,” he whispers.

Their villain must hear him because he sighs. “well that’s a shame. Perhaps I can jog your memory,” he says.

Steve must have enough because he pushes to the front of the group, stalking forward until he’s in front of their latest villain. Natasha glances over at Tony because if anyone realized that five dead Winter Soldiers were about to be topped it was him. He looks just as confused as she did though.

“What the hell is this?” Steve asks once he gets to the small window their villain was behind.

The guy behind the glass tilts his head to the side, examining Steve for a moment. “you have a bit of green in your blue eyes. Nice to find a flaw,” he says. Natasha didn’t need to see his face to know he looked confused about that. If the situation weren’t so serious she’d yell ‘gay’ but at the moment she was hoping there weren’t aliens hiding somewhere in here.

“You had five Winter Soldiers, why are they dead?” Tony asks, apparently keen on cutting to the chase.

“Do you think I seriously wanted _more_ of them? They met their end peacefully, which is more than I can say for their victims. They aren’t why I’m here, they’re just my method of drawing you all out here,” he says.

“You’re Savokian,” Steve says, “is that what this is about?”

He shakes his head. “No. It was already a failed state before you all blew it to hell. I’m here because of a promise.”

If it wasn’t for Steve standing where he was she might have missed the light of the television screen blinking on but she doesn’t. Neither does Tony. “What is this?” he asks, looking back to the man behind the glass.

This earns him a small laugh. “I’ve learned a lot from Sakovia. Something destroyed by enemies can be rebuilt; I’ve watched it happen. But something that’s destroyed from within? There’s no coming back from that,” he says. Tony and Natasha exchange another look and when she looks to Steve he looks just as confused. “You know it almost did it on your own- I’m impressed Stark, sleeping with Steve’s long lost love was certainly a nice touch. But I prefer assurance that the job is done right.”

The screen flickers and two people appear on screen. Natasha squints at it a little as she walks up, gasping softly when she recognizes herself on screen. What wasn’t explained was why Bucky was there glaring down at her. She looks down, noting the tape in its player and frowns- this was from nineteen fifty one… more than twenty years before she thought she was even born.

“What is this?” she whispers, moving closer to the screen.

“You don’t remember training?” the man asks just as Bucky reaches out… Natasha winces as she doesn’t dodge quite fast enough and for that she goes careening into a wall. She gets back up, she was trained to do that, and quietly circles Bucky, who doesn’t move. Bold considering how dangerous she ended up but he clearly wasn’t concerned. When she strikes again it was just as fruitless as the first time, and when she tries again she fails just as fast.

“I don’t… I don’t know what this is,” she says softly.

“I’m sure you remember your past as a ballerina,” the man behind the glass says, “this is what those memories are covering. When you defected in the nineties it wasn’t the first time,” he says. The screen flickers again and this time Natasha is older. Clearly Bucky’s training paid off because she was clearly better at her job, taking out whatever came her way with ease. It isn’t until Bucky comes around the corner and neatly dodges her attack that anyone gives her any kind of a match. Her improved talent does wonders against him, but it didn’t change that he was better. When her head hits the wall she turns away, unwilling to look anymore.

“I thought Bucky was with HYDRA?” Tony asks.

“HYDRA worked with the Russians,” Natasha says, “you read the-“ she pauses, turning to Tony. “You read those files,” she realizes, speaking in a low, dangerous tone.

Tony’s eyebrows draw together, “Natasha, there are barely any files on Bucky when HYDRA first picked him up. I found almost nothing on how they initially broke him down, nothing until like nineteen seventy or so. Well, some, but not anything substantial- actually it’s kind of weird considering the meticulous detail they kept after that but... I don’t know, maybe I didn’t find the files.”

If anyone would find the files it’d be Tony, except the only other person with more to gain than the person trying to read every detail on his parent’s murderer. She turns to Steve, who’s already looking away and that’s as good as an admission to guilt for her but she asks anyways. Maybe, and that was a big maybe, she would be forgiving if he was at least honest. “Did you know?” she asks.

Steve shakes his head, still looking away.

“Don’t bullshit me,” she hisses, “did you know?” Out of the corner of her eyes she watches Tony shift a little towards Bucky, blocking her way to him.

“It wasn’t really him,” Steve whispers, “you can’t hold him responsible for that.”

No, she couldn’t. But she could hold Steve responsible for his secret keeping on a subject he _knew_ she was sensitive to. How much about her past- _her_ past- did he know without telling her? She was stupid if she ever thought Tony was the only one he’d keep secrets from; she thought it was because he didn’t like Tony. But it wasn’t that at all, it was his selfish love for Bucky fucking Barnes.

*

T’Challa had to admit that Natasha Romanov had a good poker face. He wouldn’t have predicted her outburst until it happened and from there things devolved quickly. He wasn’t entirely sure who Natasha’s actual target was but it was clear there was no love lost for Steve on Tony’s end- he was intent on ensuring that Steve was more of a target than Bucky by doing his best to make sure Steve was in between Natasha and Bucky. It resulted in Steve getting a nasty beating from what he witnessed before he slipped out after his father’s murderer.

He walks up to him quietly, surprised when he tilts his head in T’Challa’s direction. “You are a dutiful son,” he says, ignoring the crashing sounds behind them. T’Challa glances back as he watches Steve’s shield slam into Tony, who was trying to block Natasha from Bucky, who looked like he was trying to flee the scene.

“You lost someone,” he states more than asks.

“I lost everyone,” the man says, turning something over in his hands. T’Challa looks back at the ensuing fight behind him and then to the man in front of him. He lifts his gun and T’Challa dives for it, catching it before it makes it to his mouth.

“Grief consumed you, its consumed them too. And I am done with it consuming me. But the living aren’t through with you yet.”

*

Shuri winces, “you two look like shit,” she says bluntly, looking Tony and Bucky over.

Tony sighs, “bit of a fight, involved a couple super people and some hidden information. I almost died, we’re good,” he says dismissively. She looks over to T’Challa, who shrugs a little and nods.

“You’re a crap body guard, I told you to make sure he didn’t die, not bring him back looking like he had a battle with Bast and lost,” she says, waving a hand around at Tony. He looks confused but Bucky, or the other personality she didn’t know, laughs. He looked better than Tony but not by a whole lot.

T’Challa gives her a _look_. “I was busy catching our father’s killer, Shuri,” he says in that irritating lecturing tone he got sometimes. Just because he was the older sibling didn’t mean he knew more than her- actually she usually knew more than him. He couldn’t even manage a conversation with his ex without wheezing like a fool and last week she invented an anti gravity device she’s been using to amuse herself when she got bored or sad. Its come in handy lately.

“T’Challa, we both know you’re accomplished enough to have managed both. What _happened_?” That bunker looked like… well like the Avengers went through it. Lately they didn’t have a good track record and two of them have straight up told the government to stuff it. She could see why they were causing such an international commotion. T’Challa disagreed with the politics but Shuri wondered if it was warranted, even with her admiration of Tony.

They had a lot in common, but he drew his lines differently than she drew hers. Invading countries was not something she would ever do, not without a damn good reason and tracking down a teammate’s war buddy when he seemed to pose no danger was not a good reason. But that was perhaps because of her own history within an isolationist nation that did not take kindly to invasion. Wakanda did not start wars, but if someone brought one to them, well. They ended them.

Tony lets out a long sigh. “The guy- Zemo- was pretty pissed that his whole family died in the Ultron thing. Poor bastard was Sokovian. Anyways instead of just trying to kill me like your average villain would he got inventive, studied us all with the intent on making us destroy each other and T’Chaka was a convenient way to send Natasha running, me scrambling, I accidentally fuelled his plan by sleeping with this one,” he gestures to Bucky, “and then we all found out that Steve stole a bunch of HYDRA records on Bucky. Namely everything on that time he trained Natasha as a Black Widow. Go figure that’s the only thing that would send her off the deep end and uh, she kicked our asses.”

She looks to T’Challa, who nods. “We already knew she was on edge, but it appeared that Steve knowing more about her past than her pushed her over it. For now she’s gone, but we suspect she will come back eventually.”

“Hopefully I can talk her out of murder before that happens,” Tony adds. “But your brother was nice enough to offer us sanctuary in the meantime.”

“Well at least you managed to do _something_ right,” she tells him.

T’Challa throws his hands up in the air, “I captured our father’s murderer, is that not enough for you?” he asks.

Shuri shrugs, “the Doras probably could have done it in two days but they let you do it,” she says, shrugging mostly unapologetically. T’Challa looks unimpressed and Tony bursts out laughing.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last chapter! Which came late because the first version of this got fucking _deleted_ by accident. I was _pissed_. Anyways this is the end plus a couple deleted scenes. Not all of them, but a few of them anyways.
> 
> Also I went to see Love, Simon and it was _so_ cute! I loved it! Thinking of writing a Love, Simon kind of AU but we will see lol.

Bucky sits curled under Tony’s arm- a little awkward considering the height difference- but he makes it work. “You sure this is a good idea?” he asks softly. Natasha ran for a reason and he wasn’t so sure looking for her was a good idea. When Steve decided to chase after Yasha- and most of the time it _was_ Yasha- he didn’t react so well to it. It was just that Steve was lucky in having run into Bucky when he finally found him minding his own business trying to buy plums. It was even luckier that he happened to have found the apartment he had been squatting in too otherwise he would have made a clean escape.

Point was if Natasha didn’t want to be found and she was things weren’t going to go in Tony’s favor. Tony shifts, looking down at him softly, “if she didn’t want to be found she wouldn’t have shown up on that camera. The only people who rival her spy skills are you and T’Challa’s guard and we both know how thoroughly you can disappear and how thoroughly the Dora Milaje can track people. She’s just not stupid enough to make a mistake like that,” Tony points out.

Maybe, but its more likely that she slipped up. ATM cameras were the worst and they’re hard to avoid- he’d know. It’s just as likely that she slipped up accidentally one time, its not like he hadn’t had his own slipups. He’d been lucky that Steve didn’t find his few slipups earlier. “I guess, but you might want to be careful. She’s pissed off and extremely dangerous.” The last thing he needed at the moment was Tony being hurt or worse, he’s enjoying his time with Tony on what he’s decided to view as a vacation. Kind of a forced one but a vacation still. Plus Tony said it was probably a good idea to lay low until all that ‘Captain America being arrested’ stuff rolled over because everyone was going to want his take on it.

“Nat and I have a history,” Tony tells him softly, “trust me if she wanted to hurt me she would have in that bunker. She just wanted me out of the way though, I analyzed the suit’s stats three times myself and had Shuri go over them twice without telling her what she was looking for for good measure.” Science, Tony and Shuri assured him, was a complicated process. He suspects that its complicated because they spent most of their time trying to one up each other but that’s just him.

“Just be careful, okay?” he asks, smiling up at Tony.

He smiles back, “I’m sure I’ll be fine. Okoye lost her bet with me so she gets stuck taking me to Natasha.”

*

Okoye looks hilariously unimpressed with her situation but Tony finds the whole thing hilarious. “I warned you not to bet against me,” he sing songs, earning an even dirtier look from Okoye.

“I win bets with Shuri and T’Challa all the time,” she mumbles more to herself than Tony.

“They don’t bet with stats, that’s why you win,” he says. “And I’m _so_ going to enjoy one favor from a king.” He couldn’t even believe T’Challa would bet something that stupid though he had already taken vibranium off the table. Tony’s fine with that, he had more exotic plans anyways. And he’s already cashed in his favor with Shuri because someone had to consider the trigger words in Bucky’s head. Turns out vibranium did all sorts of cool shit and within a week Shuri found a way to break the conditioning permanently.

“I can’t believe he was so stupid,” Okoye says, shaking her head.

“I mean in his defense he doesn’t know me that well so when he gets a random call at four a.m to come bail me out of a prison in some random country because I’ve caused shenanigans again he’ll be surprised. Bonus points if its my own country that’s jailed me. He and Rhodey can bond about it when it happens,” he says. Rhodey has plenty of stories and he’ll never tell any of them to anyone Tony doesn’t want him to because Tony has videos of him screaming about bugs. The man could handle literal war zones but if a spider came his way he literally ran screaming away.

Okoye sighs and mumbles something in her native language under her breath, shaking her head. “Get my king to get you out of jail and I will ensure you experience some very unpleasant things,” she tells him. “Now lets get this over with. Natasha may have already realized her mistake and moved on.”

He nods because that’s a good point and sounds like something Natasha would do. “Alright, lead the way General,” he says, grinning when he earns yet another dirty look. Its not like it was _his_ fault that she lost the bets and he’s looking forward to all the _other_ cash ins he was going to get from her too. He’s fairly certain that she could sneak into Hammer’s house and help him torment the guy a little, just for fun.

Okoye is good with a plane, which Tony finds more impressive than normal because he had no idea how these planes worked. He and Rhodey were bonding over the details of T’Challa’s designs but both of them were confused on the details- rare for both him and Rhodey. Rhodey has been an expert in all things aviation for years and Tony has kind of always been the technology whisperer so the fact that they were lost spoke to how well T’Challa’s designs were constructed. When they get to Natasha’s small rural area its faster than Tony has every flown before outside of the suit and now its appreciated. “Alright Stark, get this over with,” Okoye tells him but when she turns he sees just a hint of a smile on the woman’s face. So she’s secretly fond, hmm? He doesn’t blame her because he’s totally adorable.

He does exit the plane though, ignoring Okoye’s concerned shout that he has no parachute because with the suit he doesn’t need one. As planned he’s caught long before he becomes pavement paint and he ruins Natasha’s grass but it’s a small price to pay for hopefully getting her back to… somewhere- Wakanda or one of his houses he’s not really choosy. Mostly he wants her safe and at the moment she’s skating on thin ice.

Natasha opens the door just before he gets to it and he squints, “where did your eyebrows go?” he asks before he can think of anything else.

“Really?” she asks, rolling her eyes at him.

“Better hope Thor doesn’t come back any time soon- you kind of look like that elf dude he beat the shit out of in London a couple years back because it looks like you’re cosplaying him. seriously Nat, your eyebrows are just _gone_ , like they up and ran away when you went blonde. Did they disagree with the hair color change? Get offended by the bleach? Fall off from stress? Or may-” Natasha cuts him off.

“You’re here for a reason, Stark, and its not my eyebrows so get to it,” she tells him.

He considers saying something else but he sighs, “I uh… Natasha, I got all the records back- I didn’t read them obviously but they’re not anywhere people can read them. I came to make sure that you’re safe and that you’re okay, or as okay as you can be given the circumstances. Looks like you’re eyebrows were what I needed to worry about though, were they scared off or something?” he asks, unable to keep the serious tone.

When they first met Natasha would have thought he was being an asshole intentionally but she knows better now having spent more time with him. Ironically not examining his every move made her more enlightened to why he acted the way he did. So she sighs and steps back a little, letting him in. “Thank you,” she says softly. “I… can you do me a favor?”

“What do you need?” he asks softly.

“Destroy the records,” she says and he winces.

“Nat, those records might have useful information in them. I’m not saying I personally need to keep them, but maybe we could compromise. I can encrypt them and hand them over to you- no one gets access to your past, but the information in the records isn’t gone. Sound fair?” he asks. He fucking hopes so because those records really could contain some valuable information but if pressed he would eradicate them for Natasha and she probably knows it too.

But she considers his offer, letting it sink in for a few moments before she sighs. “Fine. And I’m not going back with you. I know you want me to but I can’t. Not right now,” she says softly.

He raises an eyebrow, “figured showing up on the ATM camera would be some kind of sign to come get you but that’s okay. I get it, needing time. Probably more than you know,” he says softly. He needed time too, after finding out about his parents and Natasha has always been sensitive about her past. Whatever happened there, and he was certain what she suffered was horrific, he knows needs time to sink in and settle before the anger went away. And the hurt both with Bucky and especially with Steve.

Truth be told he was still pissed off at Steve for hiding crucial information from him especially after riding his ass about lies and _especially_ because he chose to reveal that information as a way to hurt him _and_ Bucky so he could get Bucky back. Thankfully for Tony Bucky had been more forgiving to his asshole motivations for starting a relationship with him when he dropped _that_ bomb and he was happy to ride the ‘Steve sucks more than Tony’ train for as long as he could.

Natasha swears under her breath. “I thought I missed that camera. Guess not,” she mumbles. “Just… give me time, Tony. Besides, with Steve and the Accords I think its best to lay low for awhile anyways. Speaking of how come you’re not in the headlines with Rhodey?” she asks, frowning like she just thought of that.

“T’Challa,” he explains. “Felt a touch bad about invading my house and bugging it without my knowing and then complaining about my sex life like he had a right to. So he’s hiding us in Wakanda, which, FYI, is so not what people think it is. As far as everyone else knows it’s a third world textile making nation but its actually a highly self sufficient technological marvel far beyond anything I can produce and that’s pretty impressive. You _have_ to see it,” he tells her.

She smiles softly, “maybe some day. But for now I’ll stay here, or somewhere else. We’ll see.”

He nods, “alright. Stay safe,” he says and she nods back.

“Same to you. and take poor Rhodey on vacation with you to Wakanda when he’s done dealing with the press. Poor guy looks like he’s aged ten years in the past three weeks,” she says, smiling a little. Tony laughs because yeah, he kind of did.

“I’ll send you the files the usual way,” he says, purposefully cryptic but she knew what he meant. She nods her affirmative and with that he leaves, hoping she actually would be okay.

_Deleted Scenes_

Shuri stares at her lab while Tony cackles off to the side. “What the hell is _this_?” she asks, gesturing wildly at her screens. “And what is my sand table doing?” she asks, giving it an offended look.

Tony grins, “looks like its doing the wave and as for your lab, well, and they say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks but you can teach a young puppy how to code by fucking every single computer in her lab up,” he says, laughing when Shuri gives her systems another horrified look. Its funnier because he knows she knows how to fix it all. The problem Shuri had with coding and software had nothing to do with coding _or_ software- it was her overthinking how easily it came to her that was the problem.

When he was a kid he had the same problem with simple math- for six years he was a fucking _dunce_ at math and when he built his first circuit board at six complete with all the confusing equations he used to build the more complicated bits everyone was damn confused. As far as they know he was a total dud, but thankfully his nanny noticed what went wrong. As it turned out he wasn’t stupid at all, he was just confused as to why simple math was so… simple so he overthought it so hard he screwed every single question. That was what Shuri was doing here and because he’s a total asshole he figured the best way to teach her was to force her to fight for her lab space.

“Oh my Bast I’m going to _murder_ you there are important files on these systems! Things that will literally make or break my country you ass!” she hisses at him.

“Shuri your stuff is fine, you just need to get past my traps,” he says. “Also watching you flounder is kind of fun,” he tells her, snickering.

Shuri glares at him, “when I fix this I am going to kick your ass! And then I am going to change every _single_ record of your name on every _single_ document, article, and website I can find to Tony Stank. _Fear me_ ,” she hisses at him before turning and stomping over to her nearest computer. It takes her about five minutes flat to start literally screaming at the computer and Tony just _laughs_ because it’s funny when its not him yelling at things he doesn’t understand. Sometimes when he was around Shuri he was sure that’s what normal people felt like around him. Its not a pleasant feeling either, being average sucks. Watching Shuri yell at computers and swear at them in Wakandan, however, was good entertainment and when Okoye shows up to find Shuri running around her lab screaming at the code Tony grins at her.

She gives him an offended look and hands over the money he bet in favor of himself. In Okoye’s defense betting in favor of Shuri would have gone her way in _any_ other situation but this one so it almost wasn’t her fault she lost.

*

Bucky grins and pulls Tony into his lap because this was a surprise of a lifetime and he really wanted to savor it with him. “So I saw this ridiculous video online a while ago,” he says, “with this parrot that says ‘nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition’ and I thought it was hilarious. So I bought twelve birds, trained them all to say that, and then released them in Hammer’s house for our entertainment and hacked his systems so we don’t have to like… sully ourseved with his presence being close to us,” he says and he gets the delight w=of watching Tony squeal in glee.

“Oh my _god_ this is going to be good. Has he caught any yet?” he asks, leaning into the computer to watch Hammer chasing after a bird.

“No, but one did shit on his shoulder while yelling ‘no one expects the Spanish Inquisition’, which is much funnier than the original video,” he says, smiling as Tony claps in glee as Hammer continues to chase the birds around.

His legs get tired pretty fast but Tony remains glued to the screen, cackling as Hammer continues to get slipped by the birds and its worth it to see him so happy. Plus the five minutes Bucky had to spend in Hammer’s presence did little but convince him Tony’s hatred was warranted and that releasing twelve yelling birds on him was what he deserved.

*

When Tony comes home the first thing he hears is a puppy yapping and absolutely _not_. He is not nor has he ever been a dog person and he was not going to start liking puppies now. He didn’t even love _Rhodey_ that much let alone Bucky. Or Yasha. “Where is the dog, get rid of it!” he yells as he makes his way towards the noise. He locates Yasha and the puppy in the bathroom but frowns at the woman sitting on the counter. “Yasha, you know she’s a prostitute, right?” he asks.

“Oh trust me honey he knows, he’s very loyal to you. Too bad,” she mumbles under her breath, eyeing Yasha up in an unmistakable way.

Tony gives her an offended look and then turns to Yasha, who is completely oblivious in a way he didn’t think was possible for someone so observant. “What, prostitutes can’t have friends, she’s nice. And we found this puppy,” he says, gesturing to the small Rottweiler in his tub.

He shakes his head, “no, get that out. Give it to your prostitute friend I don’t like those,” he says, making a shooing motion at the dog.

“First of all I have a name and its Nikki, second, what kind of monster doesn’t like dogs?” she asks, eyeing Tony like he’s just revealed he actually killed people for a living. That wasn’t really far off from his original occupation but still, the look was unwarranted at the moment.

“The kind of monster who nearly got eaten by one when he was five and read Cujo when he was thirteen. Man’s best friend my ass, more like waiting until man lets his guard down until he can _eat_ him,” he says, giving the puppy a suspicious glare.

“I was kind of hoping so. He’d probably make a good guard dog,” Yasha reasons, petting the puppy’s head. The dog appears to enjoy it but Tony knows that’s a ploy to get everyone to let their guard down.

“If you want a guard pet we can get a cat or like a spider or something. Get rid of it,” he says, making another shooing motion at the dog. The dog, because its some kind of killing machine or something, decides this is a good opportunity to hop out of the tub and come at Tony, who quickly hops onto the counter and nearly into Nikki’s lap.

“Excuse me, if you want to crawl into my lap that comes with a price,” she says, sounding like she was only half joking.

“Get that thing away from me and I’ll pay you whatever you want,” he says.

“Fifty grand?” she asks.

“Done, remove it,” he says, curling his legs close to his chest as the puppy tries to _climb_ the damn counter.

Nikki hops off the counter and picks the puppy up, moving away from him thank _god_. “Look at that puppy, I just paid for school because this billionaire thinks you’re Cujo,” she says in a coing tone. Soothing something that was likely to take her face off but whatever, it wasn’t his pretty face wasted and that’s all that matters to him.

Yasha frowns, “you once single handedly took out a terrorist ring and you’re scared of _dogs_?” he asks. “You make no sense.” Tony is inclined to agree but at the moment he also doesn’t care.

“Fine, I’ll admit that. And by the way befriending the local prostitute is probably the Yasha thing you’ve ever done. Get the dog out of the house,” he says.

*

Yasha glares at the computer and Tony really has to wonder how the hell he got away with hiding for so long. He _must_ have been drawing on Bucky’s knowledge of computer systems by accident because Yasha was just embarrassingly bad at computers. Finally he throws up his hands and sighs, “I don’t want to fuck busty Russian singles, I want to watch Netflix!” he yells. “Please help,” he adds to Tony.

Taking pity on him mostly because he made Yasha get rid of the dog he was inexplicably attracted to he walks over and groans. “How did you do this?” he asks, looking at the computer screen. “Is this Windows XP? How the fuck- no _why_ the fuck did you download this? Do you understand this computer is state of the art? This is… this is nothing short of computer oppression and you owe this machine an apology for what you’ve done to it. And for downloading all these viruses,” he adds.

Yasha looks at the computer and back to Tony. “In my defense I don’t know what I’m doing and just clicked on stuff,” he says.

“Apologize to the computer,” Tony tells him.

“That thing has no feelings, I’m not apologizing to it,” Yasha says.

“I am offended for that computer and I will happily take an apology,” FRIDAY says and Yasha gives the ceiling a suspicious look.

“I hope you don’t take over the world,” he tells the AI.

Tony rolls his eyes, “oh give it up, robots aren’t going to kill us all. Apologize to this poor computer,” he says.

“Um, Ultron?” Yasha asks, squinting at him.

Tony rolls his eyes again, “that was _one_ time. if we cancelled humanity every time some dumbass tried to take over the world or killed a bunch of people we would have been dead a long time ago. Ultron was a fluke, humans are naturally assholes so shush it and apologize to this innocent and abused machine who has done nothing but try and provide you Netflix only for you to _flog_ it with _Windows XP_.” He gives the poor computer a pitying glance because Yasha should not be unleashed on technology until he knew that downloading extremely out of date software onto it was a horrific act of cruelty.

*

Shuri lifts the device into the air, “behold,” she says dramatically, “our success.”

Tony stares at their abomination in horror- a look mirrored by both Bucky and Okoye. “You two were so preoccupied with whether you could that you never stopped to ask if you _should_ ,” he says, giving their latest invention a look of disgust.

“You should destroy it,” Okoye agrees.

“Its worse than Ultron,” Tony throws in.

“Is that a _floppy disk_?” T’Challa asks, walking into the lab and frowning at Shuri’s latest success.

“A floppy disk with one terabyte of memory,” she says, holding it out to T’Challa, who immediately gives it an offended look.

“Why would you make such an abomination?” he asks.

Shuri shrugs, “same reason I build anything. Because I wanted to see if I could do it and also when Tony dared me to I had to or I would be admitting defeat,” she says.

T’Challa gives the floppy disk a disgusted look. “As your king I order you to drown it,” he says.

“Aww, I just made it!” Shuri says in defense of her monster baby.

“I decreed it, it must be drown,” he tells her. She sighs and walks over to Tony’s cup of water, frowning when she can’t fit the floppy disk in the glass.

“I’ll drown it later,” she tells T’Challa.

**Author's Note:**

> [My writing Tumblr](https://tenspencerriedplease.tumblr.com/) 
> 
> For Steve- my intent here is to try and keep him as in character as possible while his relationship with Bucky goes to shit. I don't want his character to feel out of context or exaggerated while this happens because I'm trying to work on negative character development and doing it well- so feel free to tell my how I'm doing :)


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